Podcast

Witnessing something strange during the drive down the dark roads of Arizona.

There’s something about Arizona that creeps me out. I’m not sure if it’s the sand, the heat, or the lack of life in the place, but driving through long stretches of road with no lights around gets my mind to wander to some very dark places.

My boyfriend and I decided to go to a town near the southern border of the United States for my friend’s wedding ceremony that was supposed to take place on a Saturday. It was Friday morning and we were making the drive from California, but as always, we left late. Too late.

The sun was starting to set and we hadn’t even crossed the California state border. Before we knew it, it was midnight and we were on the straightest road I had ever seen when I finally decided to offer to drive. Sam was getting sleepy and I could tell by his eyes watering. His eyes always water when he holds in a yawn. I was kind of hoping he would say no, but I felt bad for him.

Did I tell you that he would know nobody else at this wedding? Just me.

He admitted that he was tired, but we had just passed a rest area. Rest areas are little spots on the side of the road with bathrooms and vending machines where you can walk around to stretch your legs or take your dog out to poop or even catch a short nap.

An option was to pull over to the side of the dark road, switch seats, and keep driving, but he suggested that we should instead stop at a parking lot of what ever gas station or shop came up along the road. I took out my phone to check Google maps for anything, but the only thing that showed up was a blue dot with a yellow road. The closest gas station would be at the next highway intersection, about 120 miles ahead. I think it was called USA Gas or some unknown brand like that.

Feeling a little bad about the situation, I told him that it was okay, that we could just switch wherever he found a wide enough space on the side of the highway. He agreed.

But just as I was turning my phone’s screen off, I saw headlights ahead and on my side of the road. The headlights were aiming toward a dark building. Sam glanced over at me, and I acknowledged that I could see the lights too.

Sam slowed down as we were passing the two-space dirt parking lot in front of what looked like a broken down wooden house about 30 yards away from the road. I lowered down my window to a gush of warm night air, and I could hear our car’s tires in the gravel a little more clearly when suddenly the sound of deep laughter numbed my face. Sam hadn’t heard it and was instead staring at the old beat up car.

I wanted Sam to drive away, but the words wouldn’t come out and he just wouldn’t get it. My heart was beating so hard, I could feel it on my neck.

Suddenly, the other car’s brake lights got brighter as it squeaked in reverse and then began to turn around toward us.

Whoa, Sam said.

Go! I remember screaming.

Sam started slowly speeding up while the other car grumbled toward us at full speed, until Sam finally got the message and stepped on the gas of my red Corolla. I rolled up my windows in a panic as the car behind us started honking and flashing their high beams at us. We must have been going at 80 miles per hour when the headlights disappeared behind us.

We didn’t know what to say to each other, but Sam was fully awake now and clearly shaken up. He had heard somewhere about criminals setting up traps for drivers on empty highways to take all of their stuff and leave them on the side of the road. I, on the other hand, had no idea what to think of the situation. I just found it strange.

We didn’t know what to say to each other, so we just stared at the dashed white lines on the road.

Up ahead, I could see bright lights and the typical Gas Station, Carl’s Jr, McDonalds, Subway logos.

When we got there, Sam decided to top off the gas tank but I had to use the bathroom so we both walked into the gas station together. When I came out of the bathroom, I couldn’t see Sam inside. He usually goes for one of those hot dogs, I don’t know why he likes them, but he wasn’t by them nor by the topping station. It was weird of him to leave like that, so I decided to peek outside and found him talking to a man by the car.

I figured that the guy had approached him to ask him for change, but as I walked closer, I saw the same old beat up creepy car we had seen earlier and I felt my face turn cold. I could see two other guys in the back seat looking attentively at Sam from the back driver side window.

“Hey!” I yelled, getting Sam’s attention.

The bearded man looked at me, startled, and started to back away toward his car. Nervously, he opened his door and got inside, started the car, and they left.

Sam was confused as he got into the passenger seat of our car and I took the driver’s side until he finally decided to speak up.

The man had approached him to first, ask him if he needed a place to stay, but Sam refused. Then started to explain himself, saying that he was doing nothing wrong and then started to aggressively tell him that he should say no word of what we saw.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the Sam’s window.

It was the gas attendant employee.

“Hey, I know this may sound crazy, but what did that guy tell you?”

Sam explained that he was offering a place for us to stay and then started threatening us to not say a word.

“I called the police already, I got a visit from police officers earlier today.”

According to the gas station attendant, the police had been searching for a car matching that description tied to a local case of a missing person. He asked us to stay while the police got there to give our witness account.

We were forced to wait about half an hour tell the police officer what we had witnessed, then we were thanked, and given a police officer’s phone number to call in case we remembered additional information.

The whole thing didn’t feel real as we got back into our car. We drove away in silence.

Who were they?

And were they trying to get rid of us in an attempt to hide whatever they were up to?

An entity in the house brings along the haunting smell of life and death.

: I started to notice that when I’m alone in the house, objects move in the kitchen or in the laundry room. They used to scare me at first. I remember nearly jumping out of my seat when I heard plates moving in or around the kitchen sink while I was eating on the couch in the laundry room. It started just like that, suddenly and loudly.

Spoons would flip out and land on the floor directly from my pans. I figured it might have just been a result of how I left them, maybe poorly balanced or something? I don’t know. But my theory went out the window when, for the first time ever, I saw an apple roll out of the counter right in front of me while I was having dinner.

Apples aren’t shaped like perfect spheres and they don’t start rolling on their own.

I live alone with my dog and I’m gonna be honest with you and tell you that I’m not the most organized person in the world. When I saw the apple roll away, I pushed my chair back from the kitchen table and ran toward the door, nearly tripping on a shopping bag and my laptop case I had left on the floor by the living room.

My dog, Lindo, chased me outside as I went nearly to the sidewalk across my unkept yard but then turned around growling toward the wide open front door. The growls went from a curious and upset type-of-growl to a more angry one and he started full on barking at someone inside. I remember looking around the street for anybody else walking by, but nobody was around. I walked slowly toward Lindo as he kept barking and nervously stepping in and out of the doorway, almost as if he were trying to summon the courage to go inside.

It was getting dark and I could feel my heart slowing down. I still hadn’t turned on the lights in my house, but I could see something through the doorway that Lindo seemed to be barking at. I tried very hard to remember what it looked like, but the best thing I can think of is the silhouette of a woman from the side, wearing an apron.

You know that typical rubbing-of-the-eyes thing people do in movies when they can’t believe something? I did just that.

Just as I was getting closer to get a closer look, I heard a distant humming of a familiar song but couldn’t remember the words or even the title. I was drawn toward the porch, almost like in a trance or hypnosis. Lindo stopped barking, and started whining quietly. Just then, the silhouette turned toward me. It definitely looked human, perhaps a little slimmer and taller than average, but very dark in color compared the rest of the shadows inside. Then, it did something that made my hands run cold.

The silhouette waved at me in a frozen, jerking motion. And just like that, it blended with the rest of the house and disappeared, never to be seen again.

Lindo started wagging his tail and with his head down, walked inside. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, but at the moment, I remember feeling my legs cold and tingly, a mix of fear and excitement. But as my eyes adjusted to the dark interior of my house, I couldn’t see anybody, but the familiar scent of roses filled the living room as I walked through it to get to my light switch.

When the lamps turned on, I saw Lindo lifting his nose and sniffing the air. That old golden retriever had been with me ever since I moved into the house and had always perked up his ears when the objects would move, but now he seemed more relaxed. Surprisingly, so did I.

I can speak of it now as just a peculiar experience that I tell my friends and family when they come over, but I can’t tell you that it scares me anymore.

Just today I heard the sound of a broom stick sliding slowly across the backside of the door to the laundry room as it fell to the floor. Instinctively, I walked over the laundry room to pick it up, but I also swept the lint from the floor by the dryer and put the broom back in the supply closet.

I felt a smile creeping up across my face as I walked back to sit down on my couch. I knew what would follow.

It happens when I come home from work, and after I wash the dishes.

Sometimes it happens after I fold my laundry.

It creeps up on me slowly, and with all the memories that come with it. The gardens, the park in the springtime, and the haunting smell of a cemetery. My friends are also aware of it.

It crawls to me like a sinister reminder of beauty and of how fragile we are.

Here it is again: the smell of roses.

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Back in the day, we used to see these very sad photos on the sides of milk cartons with the word MISSING in capital letters. The black and white photos never really meant anything to me. That all changed when I saw my friend’s face on there.

The long messy hair, his crooked smile, and the yellow jacket he would wear almost every day, now all greyed out in that portrait.

We met in 1^st grade at the lunch table. The lunch ladies set up an ice chest with ice cream bars by the trash cans with a sign that said 25 cents. They were orange-flavored, and not very good, but I would always carry a quarter with me and waited for Wednesday to come just to buy one. I was about to stand up to throw my tray away, when I heard the sound of a coin hitting the ground and rolling toward me. I looked down and stepped on the old quarter as a nerdy-looking kid came up to me, tried to say something, looked down, and began to walk away.

“Hey,” I called to him, “here’s your quarter.”

Without saying anything back, he got on one knee and reached for the coin. He struggled a little to pick up the quarter but eventually got it between the nail of his index finger and thumb, then walked toward the ice cream table.

I grabbed my tray and walked over to the trash can and stood in line behind him by the table.

It’s been a long time since then, but we eventually became friends and I would go over to his house across the street and he would come over to mine to play Game Boy games and let each other borrow game cartridges. He was really good at finishing up the games.

I remember he was good at a lot of weird things, like cheating at card games, dominoes, and could figure out some pretty odd things. Once we got computers in our classroom in 3^rd grade, I started noticing a change in how he acted. During lunchtime, we would hang out in the library of our school and he would show me pages, which much later I found out were actually forums, where certain users would release challenges that anybody could work on through programming software.

I never really got into it and would usually play Doom, hidden away from the librarians and aides, but Carlos got really into it.

Some of the tasks seemed simple, but they had many steps. They were like puzzles or scavenger hunts that you would eventually direct-message to someone, a stranger, on the internet. As a prize, you’d receive some type of virtual points that would show up along your username on the forum, and you could get up to level 100 and be an “expert” or something like that.

It was the summer between 3^rd and 4^th grade when things really started changing.

His parents had gotten him a computer and a dial-up connection, so we would play chess and look up cheat codes for games, but he always seemed to be working on these forum challenges on the side.

One day, Carlos told me that he had gotten a message asking him for “The day when everything disappeared” which, according to him, was also part of a challenge. Eventually, he would only talk about databases and laboratories.

He started mentioning things about dimensions and alternative numbers.

I followed along with his stories, pretending to understand him half the time. I didn’t know I would be questioned over these things. Now I wish I would have paid more attention.

One particular project he mentioned before he went missing, was a search for a man. Supposedly, a man had been captured and had released a series of coded messages. One of the messages was a scanned photo with a date and short description on the back.

I remember this project because Carlos started becoming obsessed with me learning a type of system to read messages using a walkie talkie, then with images. When my family got an internet connection at my house, he started sharing strings of numbers that another program would capture and would spit out a sentence in plain English. This message then had to be counted for syllables, number of vowels, and referenced with a table that we had made up. It seemed interesting at first, but an hourlong process just to get the word “macaroni” seemed pointless, even for 9-year-old me.

I was walking home from school when a black car pulled up next to me and a man rolled down his window to say my first and last name. I admit that I was a chicken back then so I just ran as fast as I could through the little groups of kids along the way home without looking back, finally making it home.

I never found out what that was all about, as I don’t think the car even followed me home.

As soon as I turned on the computer and booted up the connection, I got a string of random letters and numbers. Carlos hadn’t been in school that day, so I figured he had just sent me a message out of bored. I pasted in the numbers into the program, and it calculated a 7. 7 meant H. Then I kept entering results until I read the whole word: HIDE.

That was the day Carlos disappeared.

A police officer showed up the following day at school to talk with me, and my dad was there with him, along with my 4^th grade teacher. Thinking back, I don’t know how much that teacher knew Carlos since the school year had just started, but she tried to help out, saying very nice things about Carlos. Things about his grades, and stuff like that.

I remember feeling confused and sad, and had to answer many questions about Carlos, including things he would do on the internet. I told him about the challenges and about the latest project, but the police didn’t seem to understand anything.

I never saw Carlos again. I spent years visiting the forum until it was taken down or transferred, and eventually I just stopped. But I know he’s still alive.

After graduating college and moving into my own apartment, I found that old computer and to my surprise, it booted up. All of my childhood memories started running wild through my head as I saw the old windows 95 logo and the icons of the crappy games we used to play.

What made my stomach turn, though, was the hundreds of transfers I received when I connected the internet adapter. They were from Carlos. The last one had been sent to me 6 months before turning on the computer.

I’ve decoded every single one, and they all seemed to be repeating patterns.

ALTERNATIVE, LIFE, EIGHTYEIGHT, HARBOR

ALTERNATIVE, LIFE, EIGHTYEIGHT, HARBOR

All except for one word, “HIDE” which was randomly placed in between all of the single word messages.

I’ve asked some of my programmer friends about this, and they’ve said that it does not seem to be automatically sent, and that the word HIDE might actually be a command and not a message, and that the messages may have been sending undetected.

I’ll keep working on finding out where he is or at least how send a message back to him. I’ve got a couple of friends together to help me on this project.

Despite all of this, I’m glad Carlos is alive. One time my dad said that he was too smart for his own good.

I think some secret organization discovered that as well.

There was a house I used to walk by when I was a kid. We lived in a suburban neighborhood, so many of the houses shared yards and everyone kept their houses neatly painted with white and blue paint, with the occasional yellow house. Every house, except one of them, that is. That’s what this story is about.

It was empty for long periods at a time, I remember it when I was in 3rd grade it had gotten boarded up, but then there was a young family that moved in, they had a daughter about my age and I had a lot of fun playing around with her, but she had to move and change schools shortly after. Nobody really knew why the house would be empty most of the time, but the rumor around the school was that it was haunted and that the house had a radio attached to the living room wall that would play a creepy song by itself.

During 4th grade, I got in trouble with my mom because me and a couple of my friends sneaked in there and one of the nosy neighbors called the police on us. But I DID get to see the radio. It wasn’t that big of a deal, honestly, it looked like a normal radio but on a type of hole in the wall, next to a mirror, and right next to it was a chimney. The place was definitely run down, but it was too dark in there to really have a good look at everything else. There was furniture and I even thought I saw plates and other dishes on the dining room table, which I thought was pretty odd, but like I said, it was really dark inside, so it might have been something else.

The police didn’t make a big deal out of it and my friends and I were just told to go home, but the dumb neighbor went to the house in the evening to tell mom everything and I got in trouble. That neighbor was annoying.

The house was empty for about almost a year that time before a woman and her daughter moved in. Her daughter was in 6th grade and over a year older than me, I met her the for the first time outside her house. I had a three quarters in my pocket, so I flagged the truck down and it stopped right in front of the old house.

The girl ran inside the house and then came back out with a dollar bill. Just as I was grabbing my cone, the bottom of it hit the window-sill thing of the ice cream truck and the scoop rolled right off. The girl laughed hysterically at my misfortune, and I laughed as well, but only because I didn’t know what else to do. The ice cream man offered to give me another scoop if I gave him back my cone, so I did, and he put another scoop of strawberry ice cream on top. It was smaller one this time though.

I learned that the girl’s name was Sarah and that she came from Knott, a town over the hills and closer to the city. We used to go there right before Christmas in my dad’s car to go look at the house decorations. She asked me if I also went to her school, about how she had a mean science teacher, and then she mentioned her creepy house. And man, were we wrong about the house because it turned out to have more stories than me and my friends thought.

I used to wait for the ice cream truck every day to see if Sarah would come out too, and I started to have short conversations with her out by the corner of her house about 2 times per week. Out of the many things Sarah mentioned, this girl who was pretty much a stranger to me at the time outside of her house and talking at a million words per minute, she said that she and her mom actually slept in the same room because of the noises around the house at night.

They would hear footsteps coming down the stairs, with a few steps down, then stop, then up again, then stop. She also said that strange lights would shine under their bedroom door at night, in different colors sometimes, but mostly orange and red.

I didn’t know if I should believe her or not, but then she mentioned the death song and the radio. She said that she heard a woman sing, in a calming voice, the words “and I will haaang you from your feet, and –” then the voice would change and get deeper and say… “LET YOU GO”. I asked her where it came from and she said that the living room radio wasn’t actually connected, but that it was the only logical explanation her mom could come up with.

My ice cream was dripping down my hand at one point, but I was hypnotized by her stories. This girl had been at the house for less than a month and had already experienced a bunch of stuff. My mind was so intrigued that I even forgot that I was supposed to be shy around girls.

I remember passing by her house very slowly every day after that, sometimes going around the block just to see if Sarah would come out, and sometimes she would and we would talk for a little bit about random things, but the topic always ended up being about the house. Eventually I asked her why they didn’t just move out and she basically said that they were going to, but that her mom was still looking for a second job and that as soon as she found one, they would start looking for a new house.

I wished her mom had found a job. But wishes don’t always come true.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood and that girl recently, even though it had been many years since then. I can still see her crooked smile and red hair. I hear the way she emphasized the K sounds in her words.

Because not long after she told me about her mom’s money issues, the house was boarded up, and Sarah was gone. Her mom didn’t get a second job.

My dad explained the full story to me a few weeks ago after it came up after dinner one night. Up until then, I had heard rumors about Sarah and her family, but they were pretty bizarre. The true story is worse than any of the rumors, though.

It turns out that Sarah’s mom’s body was found at the foot of the stairs with a broken neck one morning, and Sarah moved away to live with a family member in another city. The news articles didn’t explain very much, but I understood that the county police were involved, which now that I think about it makes me realize that it was probably suspected that it had been no accident.