What Never Leaves: True Stories of Lingering Presences and Haunted Spaces

It's just like a dark mist that's going through my kitchen and all that. I mean, it starts happening every day. Some places don't forget, and some things never actually leave. We start off with the ghostly encounter frozen in time, and then hear about a home filled with echoes that's stolen there. My name is Edmond, and here are Beyond and Rome. It's true scary stories. So I'm from a very very old part of Texas. There's a lot of things that have gone down in that area that are not so. Great in our history. A lot of blood that's been spilled there. When I was a little girl, probably around the age of seven or eight. I was with my mother and her brother. We were walking. Around the track at a local community college up in Tyler, Texas. That's where I come from, and it was also a football field and soccer field, you know, a multipurpose We're just walking and talking, having a totally normal time. The parking lot was pretty much completely empty, because we had actually walked from my uncle's house, which was not even a block away to the field. As we get closer to the parking lot, I realized I need to stop and tie my shoe. So I do that when I kneeled down looking at my shoe tying it, and all of a sudden, I get this unsettling feeling. I can't quite describe exactly how it felt, but I knew something was wrong. That sixth sense was telling me there is something wrong. Look up. When I did, I saw what appeared to be a family of three. There was a mother, a father, and a little boy. Their faces really threw me. But it wasn't just their faces, it was what they were wearing, their car, everything about them was just strange. They looked like they stepped right out of a photo from the nineteen fifties. The woman had a hairstyle from that time period, their clothes were from that time period. They were dressed very nicely, like they had just come from church. Even their car was an old I believe, a Chevy bel Air, and these people looked faded like an old photo. With the looks on their faces. Even the little boy, there is something just very menacing about them. The father looked extremely angry, and they seemed just very hateful, even the child. But the child had. More of a desperation in his eyes than his parents. Did. I remember sitting there staring at these people for what felt like fifteen minutes it could have only been about thirty seconds. At this point, I have chills. I can't look away from them. I want to desperately, but for some reason, I couldn't look away in their eyes. They looked like they wanted to take me to where I don't know for what purpose, I don't know, but it seemed nefarious. I can tell you that, all of a sudden, my mother walks up from behind me, and she taps me on my shoulder, and it made me jump and snap out of it. It seemed like my mom saw what I was seeing, and she just very hurriedly grabbed me by my hand and took off with me toward her brother. Me and my mother never really spoke about it. I'm sure I've told her about it since then and brought it up, but she does not have the greatest memory, so I don't know if she remembers or if she really wanted to talk about it, because it seemed like it really freaked her out in that moment too. I don't know if this family, you know, could have been an apparition from the past. I don't know if you know, in all honesty, it could be just that my memory is faltered and that they weren't from that time period, but that's how I remember it. It was chilling. It was very chilling. Something dark in these people's eyes, and their intentions weren't good. I can tell you that. So the second story, I was in college. It was my freshman year in college. I had moved to a different area of the state. I was in college Station. I had moved in with my boyfriend, who is now my husband. I remember this place, this condo that we lived in. Something about the back hallway never felt right. It always felt like there was something up on the ceiling posted up there, like Spider Man watching me. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. Every time I walked to this really long hallway to get back to our rooms. There were two rooms on each side of that hallway, past the kitchen. It was in the very back of the house. Every time I walked back there, I got goose bumps and felt dread. I was so scared, and I would run into the room and being in the room felt a little better, but not that much. I really avoided that area of the house. If nobody else was home, particularly my boyfriend at the time. At one point, we started noticing strange things happening in the house. Now, my husband had. Been there already for about a year, and he would notice things before I moved in, like his wall it would go missing. There was one time. That he was sitting on a couch in the living room and on the coffee table there was a lighter that was just laying on its side, you know, And all of a sudden, this lighter, there's no wind, nothing happening in there, table is flat on the ground. All of a sudden, the slighter just turns ninety degree angle really fast, like somebody flipped it with their fingers. My husband watched the whole thing happen and was just kind of a little bit flabbergasted. But it wasn't that big of a deal, so he didn't really think much of it. So going back to the wallet, his wallet would go missing, and all of a sudden it would turn up in the most obvious spot where he had already looked multiple times. Que me moving in, that would happen to me all the time. My keys would go missing, certain just little things around the house would go missing and turn up after I had torn the house apart. It would turn up a couple days later in a very very obvious spot that I know I looked at, and it made. Me feel crazy. It made me feel so crazy because I was like, I know, I looked there multiple times. Then bigger things started happening. There was a glass on that same coffee table one night that was totally intact. When we went to bed. It had a little bit of water in it, just sitting in the bottom of the glass. I'm talking about like a drinking glass. And we come out the next morning there is a perfect It almost looked like somebody cut it, but nobody was there besides me and my husband in our roommate, Q, who didn't come. Out all night. It was his glass, So why would he cut it and then try to make us believe that something else did it. It just doesn't make sense. He wasn't like that. So we come out in. This glass has a perfect break around the bottom of it, perfect circle, complete straight line, and when we went to pick it up, all the water fell out of the bottom of it. That's how we realized it was broken. It was still intact when we walked out, but then somebody picked it up and noticed, Oh my gosh, it's completely cut all around the bottom. It was very, very strange. On top of that feeling that I used to get walking down that hallway, I would sit in the living room and all of a sudden, I'd start to feel a little panicky, a little strange. And I couldn't see the full kitchen from the living room couch, but I could see a little sliver of it going back toward that scary part of the hallway, and all of a sudden, I would see a shadow, a tall around six feet shadow, go past that sliver toward the back of that hall The first few times had happened, it scared the daylights out of me. I didn't know what to think. I told my husband about it, and he replied with, Oh, yeah, that's just Donald. Don't worry about him. He's chill, he's cool. Well, he was cool. To my husband and the roommate, but not to me, because I was the only one that it really liked to mess with. Once I moved in, it pretty much stopped messing with everybody else's stuff and only messed with mine. I was the only one that would see the shadows in the house, and it was really only in that one spot. It was in the kitchen, going back toward the hallway, the very back hallway. Again, I'm seeing these shadows, and it's happening more and more frequently. It's just like a dark mist that's going through my kitchen and all that. I mean. It starts happening. Every day to the point where I was totally dis ties to it. It didn't scare me anymore. I just expected to see it, and once I did, I really would just go back to watching TV or doing whatever I was doing, because it seemingly would leave me alone. It just wanted to mess with my stuff. One day, I'm cooking dinner in the kitchen with my back turned to the majority of the kitchen and the living room, and my sweet little kiddy cat his name was Bo, starts looking over my shoulder, my left shoulder. I remember that very very well. And he locks onto something and his eyes start to get really wide, and he starts to get into a threatening position where he's fluffing himself up. Now he's standing on all fours. Whereas he was sitting down, just relaxing, chilling, watching me cook. Now he's fluffed up fully and he's an intimidating cat. I remember he was not looking at my face. He was looking next to my face. Nobody else was home, it was just me and Bow starts growling, and then he starts hissing and bearing all of his teeth. I mean, he's trying to. Scare whatever is in there because it's scaring him, and he's nervous. He's not wanting to leave my side, but I can tell he wants me to run. After this hiss. He kinda is looking at. Me, and I feel the wind like somebody walking really close behind you, and I hear a really deep raspy breath behind me in my left ear. Again, Bo was looking over my left shoulder, and then I hear this deep raspy and I'm telling you, I grabbed the cat, ran outside. I left the hamburger helper on the stove, called my boyfriend and was like, I am not going back in that house until you or Q gets home. I'm not going back in there. I refuse, and I did. I sat out there with the kitty cat for I don't even know, maybe thirty minutes before one of them got home. And they're telling me it's okay calm down because they didn't have the experience that I had in that house. Whatever it was, that entity didn't seem to want to mess with them so much as it did me. After we moved out, my husband's cousin moved in and her name was Blair. Blair texted us. One day and goes, hey, I don't really know how to ask this without sounding a little bit weird, but did you ever notice weird stuff happening in this condo? And we were like, yes. But don't worry. It's not violent and never tried to hurt us. All it ever did was try to spook us, particularly me. She was like, yeah, that's kind of what I thought. It's spooky in here sometimes and I don't like that back hallway. And when she said that, I like jumped up and was like, are you freaking kidding me? I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. She didn't live there very long and moved out probably about it. Yeah, she can only stayed there for about a year. I believe we actually lived on fraternity Row. And I know, unfortunately that there had been some very tragic deaths that happened out there. One kid during a hazing ritual. He basically drank himself to death, and he died that night from alcohol poisoning in the frat house, and his frat brothers did not realize that he was in fact deceased, and so they were trying to wake him up. And you know, they're in the party mindset, they're all drinking, they're doing you know, illicit substances, and so in their frame of mind, huh, let's body slam them to wake them up. Yeah, well, they were body slamming a dead person and dragging his body around the party not knowing. I mean, they really didn't know. But after that happened, that fraternity was shut down and a different one moved. In later on. But I'd be interested to hear what some of those frat brothers have to say about that house, because I'm sure it's kind of dark. All the stories I have take place in Portland, Oregon, in my childhood home. So we live in a part of Portland. It's pretty separate. You have to drive not very far, but it takes about the same amount of time to get everywhere, so it doesn't feel like we're in the city, but it's not quite super suburban it's really really sweet. It's pretty quiet over here. So we moved in when I was about two or three. One of the first things that happened was we had a neighbor tell us that somebody had died in this house. We've always told it as a funny story because what happened was he was trying to open a jar of pickles, and he put it between his legs to hold it, and he could twist the lid with both hands, and the jar broke and it cut his fun artery. I believe that. He made it to the bathroom because I've always had this weird thing about bathrooms. I had nightmares about our bathroom and other bathrooms all through my childhood. I was really scared. To be in there alone. And there was never really a good reason for that. There were really only a couple of things that happened when I was growing up. Number One, the door. We would constantly hear the door open and close the front door. It got to the point where we actually started setting the alarm while we were all home, just so we would know if the door had actually opened, because every time you'd hear it open and shut, but you'd go in there and it would be closed and locked. Check the whole house, nobody's there, And this would happen over and over. One of the more. Significant things that happened was I was maybe like five, and my grandma came to stay with us, and I was little, so she slept in my room, and in the all of the night, my dad came in and he said good night to me, and he gave me a kiss, and he left. And in the morning my grandma said something about it, and he said, I never went in your room when I was twelve or thirteen, kind of when I started being home alone more. One other thing that would. Happen was I would be in the living room on the main floor. This house only has one floor, but there's always been an attic space. But the only way to access the attic would be to actually put a ladder up on the outside of the house and climb in through the front upper window. There was no access to the attic, but. I would hear footsteps walking around up here, and that would spook me. But again I knew it really couldn't be anybody, because there was no way that I wouldn't see somebody put a ladder up to our house. And crawl in. So I didn't worry that much about it. It was just it was another creepy thing that happened. The next thing I remember is when I was about fifteen, I was in high school. My best friend, he lived in London. He tried to take his own life, and he had sent me a goodbye message and then dropped contact. Because he was in a completely different country. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't contact anyone that he knew or emergency services. I was just left with these really big feelings. And I was in my room and I was sitting on my bed and I was just crying. I was having this big panic attack, and I remember just in a moment, this feeling washed over the room. It was like the entire room took this really big, deep breath. I stopped crying because I felt so just soothed. It was really really calm. It was very peaceful, and I thought that he had come to visit me and he was there with me, so I just I was sad, but I also just felt like everything was completely fine. So I just sat with that for a little while. And after maybe ten minutes of that, and I still don't understand why the feeling suddenly turned angry. I've always been really sensitive to the feeling of a room like that, and it was so weird. It just changed in a moment. Suddenly it was aggressive and it was mad, and I just hid under my blankets until it went away, probably another ten minutes, and then that just faded off to the kick is my friend was actually still alive. He was in the hospital all that time, so it wasn't him. Neither of those feelings were him. So I still have no idea what on our fete is because it's also the only time that any kind of presence in this house has ever felt aggressive or angry like that. It's always been really subtle, really peaceful, sometimes jarring, but never scary. One quick little story. This only happened once, but I had one instance of missing time. I was maybe twelve or thirteen, and I was home alone. I was sitting in the living room just watching TV. I'd made myself dinner. I was eating dinner, and I heard clattering in one of the rooms in the back of the house. So the front door opens into the living room, and then there's a big doorway into the dining room. Through the dining room, you access the kitchen, and then from the kitchen you get to the two bedrooms and the bathroom. So I couldn't see, but I could hear because it's a really small house, and I heard distinct sounds, you know, somebody opening and closing drawers and things like that. I started to panic, and I got my phone and I. Got the dog. The dog wasn't barking, she wasn't worried about it, which was weird. But where I mean, hand on the door. I'm about to leave, and I hear a cough from the other room, and I realize that's my mom, and so I call out to her, and she calls back, and I go in the other room. She's right there. She had fully come through the front door. We had greeted each other, and she had gone to the back of the house. And I had no memory at all of it. Everything else that happened happened after my dad died, which was when I was sixteen. I remember, not very long after he died, my grandparents came to stay with us. My grandma in the middle of the night, got up to use the bathroom, no big deal. She left, She came back to bed, but in the morning, my grandpa says something to us about when did you guys get a white cat? And we all just stop and look at each other because we had a cat at the time, but she was a Tory and everyone knew her. We didn't have a new cat, but my dad had always had white cats when he was growing up. In the middle of the night, when my grandma got up to go to the bathroom, this white cat had wandered into the room and gotten up on the bed and said hello to my grandpa and then left before she got back. There was another time where my now partner we were home alone, the two of us, and we were in my room and we weren't doing anything. I think we were watching TV. And suddenly the light in the room starts sort of flickering. It turns off, and then it gets right, and then it turns off and it gets bright, and I just sort of wondering and kind of playfully I said, Dad, And it pops really loud, and the light just goes out. So this whole time, a lot of small things are happening. We would always say, you know, things aren't where you left them. You would put something down and you would leave and it would come back, and it would just be in a place different enough that it kind of made sense. I might have moved that and forgot, but it happened so consistently that we knew there was something else going on. When I was eighteen, the housing situation here got kind of weird. Basically, I had a couple. Friends move in, and again, it's my childhood home, so my mom her plan was to move out, but for this little period there were. Four of us in the house. One time, one of my friends and I, it was just the two of us home, and we decided to take the. Dogs for a walk. We had been just sitting on the couch, just watching TV. We walked the dogs and while we're on the walk, we realized neither of us has our cell phones, which wasn't really a big deal. We weren't going far. So we go on this walk and we come back into the house. We had locked the door, and we cannot find our phones anywhere. We're you know, looking on the couch, we're tossing the blankets, all of that stuff. We searched the house and eventually we started digging and we found both of our phones completely buried in the couch, and I know you think, oh, well, we were sitting on the couch. It fell out of your pocket. These were so deep they were hard to find, and there was no way that could have just happened. While all these. Things are happening, we're talking about them. It was never a secret. You know, we weren't a religious household where you don't talk about it, you don't give it attention. But the conversation was very casual. It was like it was just something that had always happened to us. It kind of was. But it really ramped up after my dad died, and even through that, we would just sort of when every would come home at the end of the day, we would just, oh, yeah, here's what happened today. Here was that weird story. Okay, moving on. We not only didn't worry about it, ahis was sort of that was our way of life. The major stories there are two big ones. One of them was when my mom and my partner were home, just the two of them. One of them was in the living room and the other one was in the kitchen. So again they're not within eyeshot of each other, but they both heard whistling and so they both assumed it was the other one, and it went on for a couple of minutes until finally, for some reason, one of them said, hey, is that you and the other one said, no, I thought that was you. And then there was this really loud pounding on the wall in the living room. And the interesting note. Is that the pounding. Came from the place not the front door, but next to the front door. But if you look at the historical records for the house, it's actually where the front door used to be. My mom and I were in the kitchen, can't see the front door, and we hear my friend come through the front door. So we hear the door open, and we hear her voice as she goes to greet the two dogs, and we hear the dogs tapping around, you know, you hear their claws on the wood. We hear them excited to see her, and we hear the door shut. And so my mom and I just look at each other and we're like, oh, she's home, No big deal. We go about our business, and after a few minutes we realize we haven't heard anything. She didn't come into the room, but we also don't hear her moving around. We don't hear her voice anything like that, And so we go into the living room, she's not there, front door still locked, dogs are laying down. She never came home again. All of this, we've never felt like it was threatening. We always kind of considered that the man that came to say good night to me stuff like that, that it. Was probably the guy who died here. But I believe that time isn't linear, and I've often wondered if it wasn't the guy that died in this house. But you know, maybe my dad after he died, maybe he was able to show up and say hi. To me, but for some reason he ended up in the past like that. It's the only time that we really saw any kind of apparition. It was the only time that there was a body visible. For all of the weird stuff that happened. We never really talked that much about it. We never worried about it. It just was. I have never really believed the house was haunted in a formal sense. One of the things that I think is that the house for some reason, really holds memories like echoes. For example, you know, my friend coming home and greeting the dogs. I don't think that was some kind of entity. I think that it was more like a replay, you know, the knocking on the. Wall, stuff like that. I think that's what a lot of it is. As for stuff moving, things like that, I think that could be my dad. He was always a. Jokester and things would always happen. Whenever we moved his stuff, things would get worse. He was a rock collector and he had this rock It was a beautiful display cabinet and he would spend his days organizing it and just fidgeting with it. And after he. Died, every time we would move that rock cabinet, things would gear up, you know, and just silly stuff again, just things moving, just kind of little practical joke things. But it's hard to explain. As much as I do believe that that could be him, I also don't necessarily feel his presence around the house, so I don't have an explanation for that. It just. We did always find it comforting when those things would happen, when we kind of knew that it was him. My last story didn't take place in the house, but I do think it's worth mentioning because it was a really bizarre and actually scary experience for me. A couple years ago, probably twenty twenty two, I was working a booth at a holiday market. I was selling stuff and I got to talking with one of the men who was hosting. We were just chatting. I'm a really spiritual person, so was he, so we were just bonding over that. He told me that he was essentially cursed or had something attached to him. I do believe in all of that stuff, but I wasn't that worried about it. I sort of thought, if it's attached to him, then it's just attached to him, so he would talk about it. We went through the whole day just chatting and everything was fine. But as I went to leave, I went to pack up the car, I tripped and I fell really hard in the parking lot and I skinned my knee and I broke something. Not a big deal. I'm really clumsy, and so I wasn't that worried about it. But his face when he found out. He immediately did this loop around the whole place, collecting a bunch of items for me, and he basically sent me home with this little ritual kit and he said, here's what you're gonna do. He gave me all of these instructions for a cleansing ritual because he was concerned that this thing that was attached to him was now in some capacity attaching itself to me. Again, I do. Believe in this stuff, but I really wasn't worried about it. I thought, I'm just clumsy. So he gives my car a little blessing. I make it home without incident. I was supposed to do the ritual that night, but I was tired and I. Just didn't want to. So I thought, I'll do it tomorrow just to be safe, But for now, I'm just gonna go to sleep. That night, I. Had some of the most terrific nightmares of my life. I have always been a vivid dreamer, but these I can't even explain. It was different. This wasn't a vivid dream. This was like stepping into a different timeline and living. It for a little while. I've never even been able to talk about the content of these nightmares that I had. They were so. Graphic and personal and just gory and violent. I had one nightmare that night, woke up, got myself ground, I went back to sleep, and I had a second one. And I woke up the next morning and. I just thought, huh, that was weird for some reason. I still it wasn't occurring to me that it had anything to do with this guy. I thought it was just some kind of strange coincidence. So I still didn't do the ritual, went to sleep. The following night, had another series of terrible, terrible nightmares, and the following morning I finally put it all together and I said, Okay, I need to do this, and so I did the whole ritual that he had prescribed, and it completely stopped. It was just gone. I have not had a nightmare like that since. I don't believe that anything of his actually attached to me, but the way that he talked about this entity, it was really really evil. He had broken front teeth, like he had fallen and totally biffed it, and he was like it was that, like it's all connected to this thing. He wouldn't even tell me. What I've believed since then, basically is that I brushed up against it. I mean, I got the smallest amount of contact and that's what happened. So I can't imagine what that guy is going through, but I seem to be in the clear. So ungrateful, Thank you, Brianna and Rowin for sharing your experiences with the rest of us. Now, both of the stories that we heard, or the several stories that we heard tonight, deal with echoes, replays, and time that remains frozen. Now, I watch a lot of paranormal TV shows and all that kind of thing, and I've always heard about hana things that are known to be residual, things that used to happen long ago remain and they replay over and over again. Have you ever. Experienced some type of haunting like that you appear to be unaware of anything and anyone around it before I let you go here? We did get a couple of comments on our last episode, who is that walking around at night too? Haunting encounters? This one comes from dreams, says Binging on these on the clock, I do fiber installs for AT and T here in Fort Worth, Texas, and I'm constantly in dark hallways, cramped addicts, and cross spaces. That story about the demon in the hallway hit way too close to home. I'm in houses with that exact same vibe every day. That's really greety continues. I actually found the show through was Spotify recommendation and now I've added your stories to my daily rotation and helped the shift fly by. Honestly, it makes me feel like someone is standing right behind me while I'm working. Now, I'm not sure how that's a positive thing, but I'm glad you enjoy it. I definitely get a thrill too listening to scary stories in really creepy places. But these, I mean, they take the cake, Like these situations, cross spaces, anything else to do with basements, addicts, stuff like that. I don't know how you do it. I know that I used to listen to scary stories when I first started listening to podcasts, when I was walking around at night in like dirt roads basically I used to take Specifically, I used to make way go around the town, like around like two blocks down so I can walk along the dark dirt roads that didn't have lights, so I could listen to scary stories and get into that zone. It was really cool. I don't know how you know how. Strange that might sound now, but definitely definitely like getting into that sense. Thanks a lot for the comment, Dreams, I appreciate it. How she Moogie says, love all your shows. Love the multiple stories in your show I've been a long time fan. Thank you movie for listening to the stories for such a long time. It's really cool that I get feedback. I always listen to people I've listened and have been listening for a really long time. I always like take your comments into consideration. And yeah, this was a suggestion from you guys saying that multiple stories would make a good I guess. A good format. Also longer stories as another thing that we that we got so in order. When we don't have long stories, we just put multiple stories together. Thank you for the comment. Michelle Machi says, It's Friday nights and I was craving tacos so bad. I'm always craving tacos, my favorite, but I was very tired still. I dragged myself to the kitchen and started prepping my food. And then I begin to search for true scary stories and I see this new episode. Needless to say, I wasn't tired no more, finished cooking, sat down to eat, enjoying my tacos and my favorite podcast. A great start to a great weekend. Thanks ed, Thank you, Michelle. This is very descriptive. I'm actually kind of hungry right now, and I don't think we have tacos nearby, but man, do you got anything to that? Like, by the way, the whole comment is really cool, so not just a talko fart, but yeah, you're welcome, You're welcome. And also thanks to the people who share their stories here, very grateful for them as well. And if you have a story that you want to share or you know of someone who does, send them over to True scarystory dot com. There's a form there. They fill it out and then we get in touch and if it fits the show, we schedule a call. We explain everything like how everything works from start to finish. There's no guest work. It's pretty simple. It's actually really fun too. This episode was edited and sound designed by Sarah vorhis Wendel a VW sound, with additional production by me Edwin Karubiaz, scheduling and additional material by Bianca Chavez and Sophia Berees. Try out Scary Plus over at scary plus dot com for add free content and make sure you drop some stars please for me in the reviews we get Spotify off are back. Also, Apple Podcasts really likes when people leave stars and reviews on the shows. And I also appreciate it too. I really like reading through them. You guys are really really nice. Thank you for that bewtab follow. I'll be back next week with more stories. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, see it soon