Podcast

Have you ever experienced something too weird to tell anybody about? Like when you feel like you’ll be laughed out of the room if you tell someone? Don’t use my name, please. Here it goes.

There was another boy in my class named Diego. We were both in the 3rd grade and he was somewhat my friend. We used to play together during recess, but he always used to beat me at dodge ball and girls used to approach me to ask me about him. About who he liked.

I really didn’t like that. I remember thinking that maybe if I looked a little like him I could get Joanne to notice me, which she did. She was a girl from my class who always wore the whitest shirts and never seemed to get them dirty. She would sit with her knees close together and she smelled like green apple shampoo. Obsessed much? Right? But hey, we were kids.

One day, after school, one of my other friends told me that Joanne liked Diego. I felt my heart sink to my stomach. But that day, I started noticing some of the things I was able to do.

I got home. My sister was staying after school for gardening club or something. I had a key to the house so that I could get in while my dad got home. To be honest, I didn’t really feel anything that afternoon. I was just so sad about the situation that I had forgotten that I normally would open the door and come right back outside to the porch to wait for my dad to come home from work. I was scared of the big empty house. I had seen, or imagined, my own share of creepy stuff in there.

This time it was different, though. I remember feeling so angry that I was just numb.

When I went in, almost in a hypnotic state, and straight to the bathroom and was about to close the door when I heard something fall in the kitchen. I stepped outside, asking for my dad, but his car wasn’t outside. The thing that made the noise was an old yellow box of Cheerios that must’ve fallen from the top of the fridge, where my mom kept everything. Nobody liked Cheerios except for my grandma, but she hadn’t been over in a while.

Oh, by the way, that was creepy thing number one. I started noticing more odd things that same day and in the days that followed. Actually, in the months that followed.

One time, I came into my room and as I stepped in, the door slammed behind me.

Another time, I saw my spoon flip and fly off my bowl right in front of me while I was eating cereal. Things like that kept happening. The stove top burner igniters would begin crackling when I would walk to grab something from the fridge. Just, minor things like that.

I should’ve been more freaked out about the situation, but I think it helped to know that I was the one causing everything.

One time, my cousin came over and I scared him good. We were playing around in my room when I said, hey check this out, I’ve gotten pretty good at it, as I grabbed a crumbled cheeseburger wrapper and tossed it randomly toward the closet. The paper bounced off the closet door, to my table/desk, and rolled straight into an open McDonald’s paper bag that was on the floor next to it. My cousin’s jaw dropped as he stared at me. He was scared.

What? I can do some more things, I remember telling him. Without waiting for an answer, I said, I can make the TV turn off, watch –but before I could even finish saying that, the TV changed channels by itself and into channel 3, the one that was static only. I wasn’t actually expecting anything to happen. I think I just said it just because I had gotten confident about something I wasn’t even sure about it. It freaked me out too, so I screamed and he screamed and we both ran out of the room.

Things like that would keep happening, like my alarm clock buzzing for some reason in the middle of the night, and things like me being able to predict when my dad was about to come home.

I was remembering these things about my childhood recently, and I asked my cousin about it and he claims he remembers the TV thing but not the wrapper incident. We hadn’t talked about it in a while, so recently while we were hanging out at a Starbucks, we Googled some of the things I experienced and discovered that this is actually fairly common. Young people in a state of strong emotions can make some pretty strange things happen, including moving physical objects or modifying the energy around them.

I don’t know. I’d like to find out if it has happened to anyone else.

I don’t take the train very often, so I always have to look up the maps and schedules ahead of time so that I don’t end up waiting for 45 minutes for a train to arrive.

I was visiting my parents this time. They had traveled up to visit my uncle and it was a complete surprise when they told me. I was so excited to see them that I called up the train station by my house to see how long it would take me to travel from my city to Denver. This was back before Google Maps and all that techy stuff. Around 4 hours was enough, and apparently I also needed to take a bus for first leg of the trip.

Everything went smoothly, I got off the bus and into the train. I took my seat, my tickets got checked, and I sat back looking out the window. I kept thinking that I was forgetting something, or some other weird feeling like that, but I mentally double checked everything and nothing was missing. I think I was just being paranoid.

As I grabbed my bag and stepped off the train, I saw a familiar face. I hadn’t seen my cousin in years. Someone must’ve told him I was coming, and I was genuinely happy to see him.

“Look at you, all Colorado’d out,” I said, pointing at his lumberjack-style beard and red flannel shirt. He laughed as he always did. I remember that old laugh since we were children and we played together in the yard whenever my uncle would come over for barbecues.

“How’ve you been?” I asked him, “Oh, you know, people just pass through here.”

“Yeah,” I replied, a bit confused by the seriousness of the statement while at the same time trying to pretend like I got the message. He stared at me for a few seconds before telling me to take care of myself and that he had to go. He walked toward the elevators on the platform and I went for the stairs. I thought I’d see him at the bottom floor of the platform and have to re-greet him awkwardly again, but as I was stepping down, the elevator doors opened and a young couple with a little girl stepped out. No sign of my cousin.

I took a taxi to my uncle’s house and my mom rushed to the front door to meet me. My dad came out, joking around about my beer belly, as always. We had somewhat settled in the living room, catching up with the usual stuff, though I still hadn’t seen my uncle. He had gone to the store apparently, and should be on his way back soon.

Trying to make conversation, I casually mentioned that I thought my cousin Joe had gone to the train station to pick me up. “Why do you say that?” they asked me, almost in unison.

“Well I saw him there, but he seemed in a hurry.”

They were both looking at me when my uncle opened the front door and greeted me with a half-smile and a hug. “How ya doin’?”

“Tell your uncle what you just told us,” mom ordered, in an almost shaky tone.

“Nothing, was just telling them that I saw Joe on the train station platform. Is he coming over?”

“Really now? What was he wearing?” he asked me.

“A red flannel shirt and jeans, I think. Looked like he was going to work. Is everything alright?” I asked.

“Good ole Joe,” he said as he walked toward the kitchen with a six-pack of beer and a big crinkling red bag of Doritos.

My mom and dad both turned to me, and that’s when I heard my mom say, “Oh, dear. I, uh, well, I’m not really sure how to say it,”

“Son, Joe died in a car accident last week,” Dad interrupted. “He drove his car off the road in the middle of the night and was found the next morning. Those clothes you mentioned are just how the police described him on the report, the body of a deceased person wearing a red flannel shirt.”

I was in disbelief. I had so many things I wanted to say, or apologize, or I don’t know, but we ended up just sitting there. In silence.

I like to think about the event as my cousin just trying to say goodbye to me. I think I understand his message a little better now, though.

People really do just pass through here.

My mom sent me a doll as a joke. She knows I’m terrified of those realistic porcelain faces and gets a good laugh out of it.

I live in Ohio, but my parents live in New York, so my mom had to send me the doll through Fedex. The doll had red hair, pale skin, and a crack on the left cheek. My mom, as usual, added a note, well two notes this time, inside the box:

“Hey honey, I heard you needed some company. Just kidding. Don’t be mad.” and another note that said “There you are.”

Typical. It did get a laugh out of me though.

Oh, there’s a thing you have to know about my mom: she’s obsessed with antique shops. When I was little, we used to go and I used to flip through the many old albums that were there and it was until much later that I realized they probably came from dead families. Over the years, I collected a photo of a young girl on a swing, being pushed by her father, many black and white portraits, and other things like that. I didn’t find them creepy back then, I think I just felt happy knowing my mom let me buy something. The old people behind the counters would give me my change and put my photos in a paper bag while my mom waited in line behind me.

I felt all grown up. I wanted to grow up. Joke was on me. This is not what I expected it to be like. I live with other roommates from college, and for the first time ever I had to purchase my own house cleaning supplies and groceries.

One of my roommates is really cool, but the other one never comes out of her room. We find her a little odd. She’s an international student from somewhere in Europe and has the coolest accent, but we don’t get to talk to her much. We hear her walking around in the middle of the night though, she doesn’t understand that here, we don’t slam the cabinets shut while the rest of us are sleeping, but she got angry with us when we brought it up so I glued a dish sponge to the corner of the cabinet door but I didn’t think it through because it doesn’t close properly now. But it doesn’t make noise at least.

I left the box by the door and next to the couch in my living room, grabbed my bag and left for class, but when I got back, the box was on the dining room table, opened, and as I got near it..

“I love. Can I have?”

My roommate said from the couch, holding the doll with both hands, making it stand on her lap. She never turned to look at me, she seemed too distracted with the doll. I thought it was weird, but I said:

“You can keep it in your room if you want, but it’s my mom’s, so she might want it back eventually.”

“Yes…” she said, seeming as if she was going to say something else, but she never finished and just sat there. I could swear I heard her humming a song, but I can’t be certain.

Things got creepy since that day, and all my friends that I tell this story to tell me to leave the house. There’s lots of things that have happened, but I’ll mention only a few.

I got up to go to the bathroom around 3am one night after holding it in for far too long, so I opened my door, and as soon as I felt the rush of cold air, I bee-lined to the bathroom and sat on the cold toilet seat. As I was peeing, I noticed a small ball of yarn on the bathroom sink, stained with some type of black ink. I was reaching out to it when I heard pounding (and I mean HEAVY pounding) on the bathroom door. It wasn’t locked, but whoever was outside wasn’t aware of it. I yelled out “just a minute!” assuming that one of my two roommates was about to pee herself and the pounding stopped. I flushed and reached to the door to open it when the weird roommate pushed me out of the way and grabbed the yarn from the sink. I washed my hands next to the ink that was left behind on the sink. I went back to bed and didn’t give it much thought.

About two days later, I heard some noises next to my bed. Someone was whispering words in a language I hadn’t heard before. I sat up and reached for my lamp when my door swung open and shut, but I could barely see a silhouette leaving my room. I turned on the light, and my jacket that was hanging on a hook behind my door was moving from side to side. Yep, someone had just been in my room. I got up and opened my door just in time to see Helenke’s door, the roommate that asked me for the doll, close slowly in order to not make any noise. I walked up to her door and knocked, but she didn’t respond. I knocked again and again. Suddenly I heard another door open, it was Stacy’s door.

I explained to her what happened, and she said that yeah, and signaled me to come into her room across the hall. She told me that I have to watch out for her because apparently Stacy’s cell phone had gone missing the week before but was able to trace it back to here with the GPS locator app. When the alarm went off to locate it, it had been in Helenke’s room. Stacy said that Helenke had accidentally grabbed it thinking it was hers and apologized, which sort of checked out because Helenke eventually found her own cell phone in her kitchen cabinet, the one with the sponge I glued.

Odd things kept happening on occasion, some involving the sounds of pacing back and forth in the middle of the night, laughter and random times, and a sheer coldness to the air in the apartment. Sometimes I would catch Helenke sitting on the couch smiling at the wall very early in the morning and I would have to keep throwing out stinky bananas and other stuff that belonged to her because she would let them spoil in the fridge.

I knew Helenke’s family probably had money because I knew that she didn’t work, and supposedly did all of her classes online, so she hardly went anywhere. But now I don’t know what to think.

About two months ago, I saw a post from Stacy on Twitter. It was a photo of a porcelain doll with dark hair, and I tweeted back “Creepy.” to which she replied “I know, right?” and almost immediately, she text me with:

“I found it on my phone, I have no idea where it came from.”

Call it paranoia or fast reasoning, but I put the pieces together crazy fast. I looked back at the photo and saw the crack on the doll’s face. That was the doll my mom had sent me, but with dyed hair. Helenke had probably used Stacy’s phone to take the photo before Stacy found her phone again and didn’t delete it.

I confronted Helenke about it, and she got visibly upset at me. She said that the doll doesn’t sleep in her room anymore, and she said it with exactly those words. I didn’t know what to tell her, but I yelled at her calling her a creep and a witch and I don’t know what else I said.

Helenke hasn’t talked to me since then, but she talked to Stacy sometimes. Well, before Stacy left.

Stacy moved in with her boyfriend and promised to help us find another roommate to split the bills with but so far its been three weeks and nothing. Also, she said she caught Helenke sitting on the floor of the living room smiling at the wall and got freaked out by the whole thing.

Not knowing what to do about my rent situation, I called my mom and she said she could help me out, but that I should try to sort out the issues with my roommate because, in her words, she was legitimately concerned about my health. I had grown a little distant, that’s true. I also stopped feeling hungry.

I was staring at the ceiling from my bed, around 2am, with episodes of New Girl playing on Netflix on my phone, when I heard a cabinet slam shut. Then some dishes got moved around. Then soft laughter followed by some humming, and then more slamming of the cabinet doors. I got up ready to let her have it, but as soon as my door creaked open, Helenke ran toward her room and I caught a glimpse of her, and a small dark figure walking behind her.

She closed her door.

I went to the kitchen to turn off the lights when I noticed the sponge I glued to the cabinet door had fallen off and was on the side of the kitchen sink, but the cabinet door was left open. I walked up to it and found a doll-sized chair, a miniature lamp, and one of my mom’s notes. On the shelf above, there was an old book, an album, and a stack of photos.

I grabbed the album and flipped through it only to find my black and white photo of a young girl on a swing, being pushed by a man. Every page after that was empty. Helenke must have taken it from my room. The stack of photos were mine also.

I ran to Helenke’s room and twisted the doorknob, which was unlocked, and I flicked on her light switch but the light didn’t turn on. I didn’t care. I went off on her. You’re crazy! Who are you? What makes you think this is okay?

I yelled at her while she tried to speak over me but I wouldn’t let her. I must have told her every single thought I’ve had about her ever since she moved in. She started crying and ran to my room and locked herself inside. I pounded on the door but all I heard was her annoying voice yelling back in some other language. I must have spent ten minutes knocking as hard as I could.

There were knocks at the front door. I looked through the peephole only to see a pair of police officers waiting for me to open. I did, they asked what the commotion was, and I let them in. I was up until 6am that night with the police until Helenke finally opened the door and started answering the police officer’s questions. For once, she seemed normal.

The police didn’t find anything weird about the cabinet or the fact that she had been stealing things from my room.

I woke up around 3pm that afternoon to the sound of the front door slamming. I had been hearing sounds of things being moved around all morning but I was just so tired that I would fall back asleep again right away. I walked over to the living room to see Helenke’s door about halfway open. It was a Thursday and I had already missed my classes so I decided to go out to buy something to eat and come right back, but I ended up visiting Stacy at her new place to talk about the whole thing, so I got back to my apartment pretty late.

I didn’t want to see Helenke so I didn’t even bother to turn on the lights and just went straight to my room, locked the door as always, and changed into my pajamas.

Then, like clockwork, I heard the cabinet door slam again.

I got up, opened my door, and went straight to the kitchen but then I heard Helenke’s door slam. She must’ve been doing this only to bother me. She didn’t even cook or anything at night, she just wanted to make noise just to get on my nerves.

I opened her door and flicked on the light switch. The ceiling light turned on.

Helenke’s room was empty. She had moved out and taken everything.

Well, not everything. She left my doll. Her hair was dark now.

It was sitting on the corner of the room on top of a piece of paper. A note.

I slowly walked over to it. It said:

“There you are.”

I’m trying to be as respectful as possible in sharing this story with you, but I need to tell the world about it or I will go insane. For those of you who don’t know, Airbnb is a service that allows homeowners to rent out their houses for a few nights or for longer stays to visitors, essentially turning your place into a hotel. I’ve stayed at a few of them, and though some were better than others, none come close to what I experienced one late night in the desert region of the United States.

My plane arrived late, as expected, and there was some strike going on with Uber and the prices for a ride to my Airbnb were through the roof, but I had no choice but to pay $80 for a 15 minute ride to the address that the host had sent me while my phone was still on airplane mode. 5667 was the code to get into the gate, he said. There were very detailed instructions on how to to get into the house –almost too detailed. Park downhill from the house, don’t disturb the neighbors. Enter the keycode exactly as listed followed by the # key. Follow the path of red bricks toward the back of the house. Key will be on the door and ready for you. Do not disturb the neighbors. Yes, he said it twice. This was a self-service type of stay, I guess nobody would be there to greet me and let me in. That’s fine, I thought. I actually preferred not having to make small talk with anybody and going straight to sleep.

The wind was blowing but the night sky was clear. I had never seen so many stars in my life. The Uber left before I entered the key code into the box, which was frustrating because I couldn’t seem to make the door click open and there was nobody in sight outside. Made sense. Who would be out at 1am?

Just as I was about to call the owner of the house, the door clicked open after I pressed the # key. Thank goodness.

The bricks wobbled as I followed the path to the back of the house, but when I finally got to the glass door, I saw the key. It had a keychain in the shape of a license plate, an Arizona one. I turned the key, opened the door, and found a normal room with a large bed, and two doors, one to the closet and one to the bathroom.

I opened the door to the bathroom and lifted the toilet seat only to find bloodied up toilet paper in the bowl. The person who cleaned must have forgotten to flush. I didn’t even want to open the lid of the trash can, but I couldn’t help myself and pushed the button with my foot to get the lid to pop open, but it had a clean white bag, to my relief. These things happen sometimes, and I’m not known to leave complaints on the review sections of anything, so I flushed the toilet, took care of my business, and went to the sink to wash my hands. When I looked up at the mirror, I saw crusty brown stains on the edges of the frame. I saw them on the corners of the faucet and the knobs. Dried blood.

The place smelled nice though, like fabric softener.

I opened the door to the bathroom, grabbed my backpack from the floor and propped it onto the foldable table that I guess was supposed to be my desk for the weekend. I grabbed my shorts I would be sleeping in, took off my shoes, and changed to get ready for bed. I was so tired that I forgot to brush my teeth.

At 5am, my alarm went off, as always, and I sat up on the bed in silence. It was still dark outside, but I had to go to my meeting with a potential buyer. Mines are a dying business, but generally older people like to purchase them and contract workers to dig for residual metals, and where’s there’s a buyer, there’s a sales agent. And that’s me. I turned on the light to the bathroom, opened the faucet to the shower only to see brown water choke its way out and then get replaced by steaming hot, clean-looking water. Something was off about this place from the start, and I should’ve caught the signs sooner.

I was daydreaming in the shower when I heard a scream from the wall next door. Now, the house was obviously shared because my room had been sectioned off to serve as the Airbnb part of the house, so I had no idea of who was next door, but the scream was nothing normal so I grabbed my towel and ran outside to my room and stood there, dripping, waiting for something else to happen. But nothing happened. The morning was still, no crickets, no dogs, no roosters. Just dead silence. I went back to the bathroom and dried off, changed, shaved while making sure I didn’t touch too much of the sink, and got my phone to wait for another Uber.

Now, the houses weren’t directly next to each other in this area, it was a weird combination of a suburban neighborhood mixed with rural fields in between, and all of the houses looked old and had big yards all around them. I was walking toward the road just as the sun was rising when I heard a voice, from an older man, talking and laughing all by himself as he sat on an old white plastic lawn chair by his porch.

Good morning, I said.

Then he got up, grumbling, turned his back to me, and walked into his house. He stood there for a while, but then he slammed the door so hard that I heard his windows rattle. I didn’t think much of it, but was definitely weirded out. The notification came through my phone that the Uber driver was two minutes away, but I saw the headlights in front of me, so I waved him down, I got in, said hello, and went to the buyer’s office in the downtown area.

It was getting dark when I got back, I took an actual taxi this time. 5667 #. The door clicked open, I followed the wobbly bricks, when I heard the door, my door, slide shut. I walked faster to my door, and I could see the curtains of the window moving around. The cleaning service, maybe? I felt uneasy but I opened the door, stepped in and looked around. Nothing seemed out of place… except for the closet door. It was right on the edge of closing shut or swinging open. As I stepped toward it, the vibrations of my footsteps on the wood floors must have triggered the door to open because the knob clicked and moved two centimeters open.

Weird.

But I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see. I swung the door open and tried to look inside. I stretched my arm out to grab the chain to the light bulb, but instead of a dangling chain or string, I felt a leather strap. A belt. I moved it around and heard the soft clinking of metal –the chain. I tugged on it and the light flickered on.

On the wooden bar where you normally would put clothes hangers, there was a belt in the shape of a… noose. It had been cut at the loop. A clump of long dark hair caught at the knot. Someone had been hung here. Then the belt was cut to release.. her.

I felt the urge to vomit so I ran to the bathroom, only to see bloody toilet paper in the toilet again. Frantically, I grabbed my backpack, stuffed by clothes back in, my towel, my charger, and looked around to see if I had forgotten anything when the lights went off.

I heard a scream. And then I screamed.

I slid the door open, and ran toward the gate. I grabbed my phone and requested an Uber. 8 minutes away. I walked toward the road again when I heard laughter once again. It was the same neighbor, but now the laughter also came from the house across the street. The neighbors looked at me and laughed. Their wrinkled faces and yellow teeth could still be seen thanks to to the orange street lights. All they did was laugh.

I walked faster, but their laughs grew louder. I got the alert. The Uber was nearby. I got in and the woman in the driver’s seat noticed the laughing and my panicked face. What’s going on here? She asked, with a smile.

I don’t know. Please, just drive. Her facial expression changed. We didn’t say a word. And I never found out about the place. I didn’t leave a review. I didn’t even look up the address on Google for news about that area.

All I know is that I am never staying in other people’s houses again.

I don’t like looking outside. My room when I was growing up had those irritating horizontal white blinds on my windows. You know the type, the ones that come up easily but take some special maneuvering to come back down. My room faced the west side of the house, so I got to see the sunsets. The beautiful ones, as well as the sinister ones that cast long shadows all over the tree-covered area of the empty lot next door.

It was occupied at one point, or so the kids at my school had told me. But the trees were so dense and the grass was so overgrown, that you couldn’t see anything inside. Every once in a while, though, I could see a dim light from inside of the mini forest turn on and off. The area itself had a short fence all around it, but as far as I could see from my window, there weren’t any gates or ways to get in aside from jumping over the cheap metal fencing.

One evening, while I was getting ready for bed, a small candle, a flickering light type of thing caught my attention just as I turned off the lights of my room. I tugged on the string to lift up my blinds, but the string wouldn’t work, so I stuck my finger in between the blinds and pried open a small gap between them to have a look. Yes, there they were. Two flickering orange lights in the darkness. I will always remember that night, I remember how cold it was, and exactly what I was wearing. That’s when everything started.

I woke up around 2am to the sound of tapping at my window. There were no branches or anything, like in the movies. My room was on the second floor and there was no balcony and no roof area by the window. If you were to drop something, it would fall straight down to the dirt next to the living room window and miss the area where my dad kept the trash cans. I tried ignoring the sound and going back to sleep, but I heard it again a little later. The green numbers of the radio alarm clock said 3:20am, with the two flashing dots between the number 3 and the twenty. I had fallen asleep to the tapping.. or the tapping had come back. I turned on my lamp only to notice that there was a space between two blinds, like someone was holding them open to look outside. Perhaps I had left them like that when I looked out toward the lights, but then I noticed something. The gap between the blinds was slowly closing, and then they became fully closed. I don’t know if I was still half asleep and had imagined the whole thing, but I tried to forget about it.

I woke up at 5:10am once again, the tapping had come back. I grabbed my blankets and pulled them over my head, but the tapping grew louder. Frustrated, I kicked my blankets away, ready to turn on my light again when suddenly the tapping stopped. Something was outside. Since the window was right across from my bed, I had a clear view of the two dimly lit lights between dried trees next door, even through the little gaps between my blinds. I’m not sure how I managed to walk over the window, but with every creaking step I thought twice about what I was about to do. It was growing colder as I got closer, and when I was finally by the window, I put my finger between two of the blinds to have a closer look, when I felt a cold hand grab my finger, and then another ice cold hand grab my wrist. I tried to yell, I tried to scream as loud as I could, but no sound would come out. I punched the blinds with my other hand and managed to see a broad smile with many teeth, a pair of dark eyes and a pale face.

The thing whispered in many voices, but to this day I don’t know how to describe it.

And just like that, it let me go and I fell straight to my knees trying to catch my breath. I stood back up to run to my door. I had knocked down some of the blinds and I had a clear view to the outside. I didn’t want to look, but as I backed away toward the door, I saw the creature, the thing, a pale.. abnormally tall creature, moving toward the pair of lights from the lot next door.

I never told my family about it, and even though I don’t live in the same place, I still hear tapping at my windows every once in a while. I use curtains now. I make sure to shut my windows at night.

You never know what may be looking in through the darkness outside your window.

I was at a concert for the new freshmen at my college in California. I had met a girl during orientation that seemed to be into me. At the time, I was only looking to make friends, since none of my friends from high school had transferred over to my new university. But I’m a social person, so it didn’t take too long before we had a little group going.

My roommate was nice and he kept to himself most of the time, though later on in the year we became good friends and still talk from time to time.

Well, on this particular Friday, everyone stayed out late hanging out at the fields of the campus, a few students had brought out guitars and we all had a good time after the concert, until campus police told us to start heading back to our dorms or drive back home because the event was over.

I walked with Mary, the girl I had met, over to her dorm, and we hugged goodnight, exchanged phone numbers, and I went on my way. Both of our buildings were on extreme ends of the campus, so the walk back was long. I didn’t know the area very well, but I couldn’t get over how silent the whole area had become.

I got back to my dorm, quietly opened the door, and changed into my pajamas in the dark. I could see my roommate’s sleeping silhouette, oddly curled into a ball near the foot of his bed, but didn’t give it much thought. I climbed into my bed directly across from his, and covered myself up in the blankets. I went to sleep almost immediately.

Sometime in the middle of the night, though, I began to hear my roommate humming a song in his sleep. Then I heard him cough in a deep voice, wiggle around in his bed. I heard several footsteps, followed by the door opening, and the door slamming. I don’t remember what time it was, but my roommate didn’t come back, his bed was empty and already made in the morning. He had mentioned that he would be going home for the weekends.

The next day, a Saturday, we had a few events going on at school, and I got to meet up with the same girl for lunch and dinner. We walked around the trails nearby, and overall had a perfect Saturday. We both headed back to my room to watch a movie on DVD she had brought from home, but around 15 minutes into the movie, she fell asleep. It was only 10pm, but hey, some people are like that, right?

After the movie was over, I moved her over a little bit on my bed, and I brought one of my blankets to the floor, and fell asleep. It was amazing to me how easily I could fall asleep in that room. It was just so quiet. But that didn’t always mean that I slept well.

In the middle of the night again, I heard something moving on my roommate’s side of the room. Then, someone humming. Then came the coughing sound. I almost knew what would happen next. Then, I heard the girl say, “Hey, why’d you move?”

“Sorry, those–” and she didn’t let me finish before she screamed. I got up and stumbled toward the light switch, flicked it on, and asked what was wrong.

With the faint light from the exterior street lamps, she was able to see a figure sitting on my roommate’s bed. She thought that it was me, and I startled her when I replied from right underneath her, on the floor.

I asked her if she heard the humming, and she said yes. She asked if it had been me, but she had somehow already assumed that it wasn’t. We didn’t really know what to say to each other, when we heard a light tapping on the door.

I walked up to open it, and found the hall’s resident assistant, in his pajamas, asking if everything was okay in the room, that someone had called him to tell him that they heard a scream coming from my dorm. I said that everything was fine, but Mary interrupted and basically told him the whole story, while I just stood there, trying not to make a fool of myself on my first weekend on campus.

The RA stood there, half smiling, and asked us to look up the history of my room, number 338 on the forums online. He said he was glad we were okay, and asked us to keep it down, whatever we were doing. It got a little awkward, but he calmly left, and I shut my door.

It took Mary literally two minutes to find the story on her laptop, which talked about a student in the 80s who had fallen down a window of my building and broken his neck in the middle of the night. He had some sleep problems and would be known to sleep walk. He was taken to the hospital but died later during the early hours of the morning. Supposedly, past students have reported sounds of someone in pain from room 338 ever since. Even when the room was kept empty. Mary seemed excited about the whole thing because, of course, it wasn’t her room. I started questioning everything, including reality, which brought up a weird sick feeling in my stomach.

What bothered me the most happened on Sunday night when my roommate came back and upon hearing the story of what had happened, he looked at me dead in the eye and told me that he had left early the day of the concert. He had missed the whole thing. It hadn’t been him the person that I saw curled up at the base of his bed.

I had been in the room hearing his hums of pain by myself in the room. I was there when the the presence sleepwalked away and didn’t come back. Needless to say, I started going home for the weekends too.

There’s an abandoned building in my town, it used to be an old grocery store. It has been abandoned for as long as I can remember. It was abandoned even before my mom brought us here.

Back in junior high, me and a couple of friends bullied a kid into going into the building by himself one day after school. He went inside nervously as we heard him knock over a few things, and then soon asked to be let out. We didn’t say anything. Then he started banging against the window and screaming at the top of his lungs. Begging us to let him out. We pushed against the board that was leaning against the window even harder as we tried to hold in our laughter. He eventually stopped screaming and started crying.

Then, silence.

We let go of the board and peeked inside, when I saw a shadow through the aisles of the old store, moving unnaturally fast toward the east wall of the building.

We looked down, and saw the poor kid passed out on the floor. Out of the three of us, I was the most normal. I don’t know what I did hanging out with them two.

In order to get him out, one of us would have to step in and lift him up to the window. I remember being scared that the kid might’ve died, that we might’ve killed him out of fear. I hesitated as I put my left leg up on the window sill, and then again when I put the right one.

I jumped inside. Grabbed him under his arms and did my best to lift him, but I weighed around 100 pounds at the time and really struggled.

C’mon, man. Just drag him! Someone’s coming. Hurry up, I heard one of my friends say.

I’m trying, I snapped back.

Suddenly, the kid moved his legs and drowsily stared at me. Then he screamed again. I told him to shut up and help himself up. He turned toward the window as the late afternoon sunlight highlighted his sweaty neck and drool coming from his mouth.

He put his elbows up and then rolled out, where my friends yelled once more for me to hurry up, that a car had pulled up and someone was watching them.

I rolled up onto the window sill when I heard laughter coming from inside the old store. I was too scared to look back, I kept expecting the thing to grip me by the ankles and pull me back in as I was trying to get out.

I landed on a pile of wooden boxes we had used to get the kid there, I tried to get myself up but fell again on my hands; they dirtied up with the old black asphalt, little pebbles stinging the skin of my hands.

“Hey!” someone yelled. It was a man stepping out of his car, parked on the side alleyway right next to us.

I hadn’t noticed, but my two friends had already taken off, and the kid and I ended up running through the old parking lot and under the wire fencing of the side of the property.

We all got in trouble and were forced to apologize to the kid, but we never saw him again at school and never got the chance to do so. I really did feel sorry about what I did.

Rumors around the school said that he had gone crazy and had to be hospitalized. Some even said that he died. It didn’t stop kids from starting new stories about Billy’s, the abandoned grocery store.

The store is still abandoned. I always look in that direction when I walk by on my way to pick up my kids at school. There’s something about it that makes me uneasy to this day.

Most of my friends laughed when one time after school in 3rd grade, I casually mentioned that I wanted to be an ice cream man. I felt embarrassed, but I thought their job was the best. They would drive around the streets handing delicious treats to the neighborhood kids.

But then, my whole life changed. My younger sister wanted some ice cream one summer afternoon, but I didn’t want to come outside. I was hooked on a new video game that my dad had bought me, and I think I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know how to pause it yet. I yelled for my sister to grab the dollar bill in the jar by my bed, and to not touch anything else.

Excitedly, she asked me what I wanted and if the ice cream man would give her any change, she didn’t know how to count money very well at the time. I told her that the total would be fifty cents, and to bring the change back. That it should be two quarters.

With a big smile, she ran outside. I lost at the game I was playing and put the controller down and went outside.

The ice cream truck was turning the corner, without the music on. I didn’t know that I would be the last person to ever see my sister.

What followed was a mix of police reports, journalists calling and visiting my mom and dad, and sad stares of people feeling sorry for me everywhere I went.

The same ice cream man stopped passing by our street and was later caught and interrogated by the police as a prime suspect, but my sister would never be found.

My parents would sit with me in doctor offices, as they asked me questions about what I was thinking, and dumb questions about my favorite games and favorite toppings on pizza.

I don’t remember much of the rest of elementary school.

All I recall was thinking that I didn’t want to be an ice cream man anymore.

We got a notice a few years ago about the possibility of the cemetery relocating where my great grandmother and aunt were both buried.

I remember thinking that it was really weird and almost thought it would be illegal to do so, but nope. Cemeteries CAN indeed be relocated just like any other business, only they are required to give advanced notice about it and take care of a bunch of legal stuff.

Well we started getting more notices about this as the months got closer to the proposed “transfer date” until the final notices arrived. We were scheduled to go witness the removal and reburial, and we decided to do another ceremony for my aunt and great grandmother.

Not many people were going to go, it was going to be me, my mother and some other distant relatives that were called about the ceremony and wanted to be present to honor them once more.

My aunt’s grave was dug up through assisted heavy machines that pulled her casket right up, placed on a truck, literally a pick up truck with a camper on it.

My great grandmother’s grave was a little different. It was in a very old part of the cemetery, and the dirt was more like rock.

This one was dug up with drills and men with shovels. When the casket was finally brought up, they were supposed to place it inside of a bigger type of cement casket for protection during transport. As they lifted it up, since it was so old, the top fell off and the rest of the box fell straight down, revealing my great grandmother’s dried up corpse.

I wasn’t really shocked, the thing looked like it was going to break anyway. What bothered me was what we discovered next.

Her dress was on backwards. Wait, no. She was facing down.

Her arms under her body, her hands under her face. Deep scratch marks all around the inside of her casket. That’s when we all realized, she had been buried alive.

I’m never taking an Uber ever again in my life.

My friends asked me to meet them over at a bar we used to go to often back in the college days. My house is about ten minutes away from downtown up in the hills toward the valley, and I don’t have a car.

I don’t like taking taxis or Ubers up to my house since the long stretch of driveway is dark, and I’ve always been paranoid about strangers knowing where I live.

I had taken the bus earlier in the day and planned to hang out at my aunt’s house until 9pm, doing work and whatnot on the computer, yes, on a Saturday night, before meeting up with my friends. I figured one of them would be able to drive me home.

After a fun night of dancing and drinking, my friends started going home, and I didn’t know their designated driver very well so I didn’t want to ask her to drive me to my house. I figured I would just suck it up and take an Uber.

Almost everyone had left, it was just me and my other friend waiting outside. I looked at the app and it showed that the driver was nearby, when an older man in a car rolled down his window and said “Uber?” that was it, here we go, I thought.

I got in the backseat and said goodbye to my friend.

Then I got the alert from the Uber app letting me know that the driver was waiting for me. I looked at the man and he grinned at me. I asked him to pull over and to let me out, but he just laughed and told me to shut up. He used more colorful language than that, by the way.

In a panic, I tried to open up the door, but the child safety was on. My phone started ringing. It was my friend, but I couldn’t answer right now.

The man was asking me to calm down as he seemed to be pulling out something, maybe a weapon, from his glove compartment. I wasn’t about to wait to find out.

He made a quick left and I hit my shoulder against the car door. If he was to make another left after this, he’d be taking me to the alleys and up toward the woods. I’d be done, I remember thinking.

I unbuckled my seat, scooted over to the middle, leaned back, and kicked at the window. It took three or four hard kicks to finally break. The man was swerving and saying that it was okay, that he was going to let me go. But I didn’t believe this freak.

I reached out to open the door from the outside, cutting part of my forearm on the broken glass, when I saw a car flashing its headlights behind me. I finally got the door open, the man stopped the car with a sudden jolt, and I practically jumped out as he started to take off again. I heard the tire’s squeak as he made a hard turn to the right on the next corner.

The car who was behind us stopped. I was freaking out. I know these guys plan these things out. They act in teams.

Then, I heard a familiar voice in the distance. It was my friend. She was yelling out my name in a complete panic. She ran up to me and gave me a hug. I accidentally stained her little white dress she liked so much.

An Uber driver had pulled up to her and mentioned my name. My friend put two and two together quickly, and told the guy, a nerdy skinny-looking dude, that I had been kidnapped and she needed his help. That’s how they ended up tailing the car I was in. Who knows what would’ve happened if they hadn’t.

We called the police and everything, but they still haven’t found the man.

I received a call from my grandma late one night, she told me that someone was trying to break into her home. She told me she had already called the police and that they were on their way over, but she didn’t think they were coming. She had called the police one too many times. I could understand that.

I was always embarrassed when my mom would make me go to the store with her because she would almost always make a scene about a coupon not working, or about how the price of an item was not labeled properly and she demanded a discount.

Her neighbors never really liked her either.

But the police did show up, and they actually caught a glimpse of someone running away from her back porch. When they inspected it, they saw that it was indeed an attempted forced entry.

I got there just as my grandmother was finishing up making her report with the police officers. She looked up toward me and smiled. When I got close to her, I noticed that she seemed very proud of herself, almost as if she was happy that she finally called the police for something that was actually worth it.

She doesn’t know much about technology, but I recommended that she gets one of those security doorbell cameras, and that her cell phone would alert her when someone showed up at the door. She barely carries her cell phone around, but she agreed to it. The next day, I went over and installed the camera I picked up at the hardware store, I also reinforced all of her doors and windows.

I decided to link up the doorbell camera with my phone too, so that I would receive alerts as well.

At home, I tested the connection and yes, it worked. I could see passing cars, and pairs of bright eyes from the cats that would hang out around the front yard.

It was around midnight when I received an alert.

“Someone’s at your door”

I opened up the app and looked at the snapshot. It was an old woman, smiling at the door. She had long, dark tangled hair. I clicked to view the live camera.

There she was. I was trying to get a good look.

Suddenly, I got a phone call. It was grandma.

She had gotten an alert too, but there was nobody at the door, she said. She said to wait a minute, and put me on hold. My grandma still uses her home phone, which she keeps connected in her kitchen. She must have accidentally hung up, because the call ended suddenly and my cell phone went back to the live stream of the security camera.

The woman was looking right at me, with a creepy smile. She wasn’t blinking.

Then, the porch light turned on. The woman turned around and ducked by the porch steps. I could see the back of my grandma’s head stick out the front door as she stepped out to the porch.

I could see the stranger’s eyes looking right at the camera. She was grinning now.

My grandma turned around just as the other woman stood up and walked behind her. I pressed the microphone button and shouted for the stranger to leave the property. My grandma became startled and ran toward the door and quickly shut it. The other woman froze. With the lights on now, I could see her face better.

She was wearing a long black dress, and her nose was small. Her evil smile never left her. I must have taken a hundred screenshots by this point so that I could show the police, even though the footage was already being recorded.

My phone rang again. It was my grandma. She told me that she heard me and that there was no one else by the front door. I asked her if she had seen the live video on her cell phone and she said yes, she had, but there was nobody there.

I told her that someone HAD indeed been there, and for her to double check her doors. I thought about sharing the screenshots with her, but aside from her not being able to open them, I really didn’t want to scare her. I made plans to drive to her house the next morning.

I fell asleep around 4am, waiting for another alert from her house, but nothing ever showed up. Before work the next morning, I went to her house. She was up at 5am sharp every morning anyway.

She saw me from her kitchen window and came up to me asking if I wanted to eat breakfast, but it was way too early for me, and without any small talk, I asked her again if she hadn’t seen anybody in the camera just to double check. I asked her what she tapped on her cell phone to be sure that she was doing it right. She was able to open up the app and view the live feed right there in front of me. Some glitch, maybe?

I told her I had seen someone there, and tried to play back the footage on her cell phone, but the camera hadn’t caught any motion except for her turning on the light and stepping out into the porch the night before.

That’s when I showed her the screenshots. Then the footage. There was an old woman smiling at her front door.

My grandma’s face froze.

That woman, she explained, was her old roommate from when after grandpa died. She was even wearing the same black dress.

The same dress she was buried in.

I live by myself in an old house. It was the cheapest thing I could afford after my divorce. The roof leaks in the living room area whenever it rains, and the bathroom lets out an old sewer smell every once in a while when the toilet bubbles. Other than that, it’s been fine.

Less than a month after moving in, the new neighbor at the time invited me to a barbecue at his house, and the whole family seemed nice. They kept asking me about my house and what I thought about it. I told them about the issues, but they seemed very interested in that house. When I asked them if they’ve ever been inside, the neighbor and his wife were more than interested in the offer they assumed I was making, and pretty much invited themselves to go check it out right then and there.

I was definitely not ready to have visitors over. I’m a messy person by nature, and I had old Chinese food take out boxes and empty ketchup packets all over my couch. I didn’t even have a coffee table or a television yet. Too late to tell them, I guess.

They stepped in and walked around, looking at the corner of the ceiling and the wall, a particular spot that had some stains running down the wall that I never bothered to clean since I moved in.

The neighbor’s wife was entering the hallway as her husband and I awkwardly stood in the living room without much to say. Suddenly she screamed and fell to the ground, desperately trying to crawl toward us, but something was pulling her back. Her husband ran toward her, helped her up, and yelled at me to help with her missing shoe a few steps down the hall.

I didn’t know what to say. I went out to the front porch to see what was happening. I never found her shoe.

The woman had already ran back to her house, and the neighbor was making his way to his house too. I decided not to go back to the barbecue, but I also didn’t want to go back inside.

It was around 11pm when my cell phone’s battery started dying and I decided to go back inside, when I heard the voice of someone calling out my name. It was another neighbor, from two houses down.

He told me that pretty much everyone knew of what had happened, and he felt it was right to give me an explanation. The whole neighborhood was aware of the house’s story already. The house had seen many new owners come in and leave. Mainly young couples.

As it turns out, the house was the home of several gruesome events back in the 70s, where a man murdered two women and hid their bodies in the attic for weeks before the smell of the corpses brought the attention of the neighbors. He too was divorced. Good man.

He was getting ready to kill his next victim, but she managed to escape and tell the police. He ran away, but was later found dead, floating in a lake. Nobody knows how he ended in there.

The story didn’t scare me for some reason, and I could tell that the neighbor felt uncomfortable at my nonexistent reaction to the story.

Oh well. I feel at home.

I rarely leave this house now. I don’t think I can leave. I don’t want to. I feel like a different person when I’m here.

It has been almost a year since the neighbor’s barbecue. He never invited me again. It’s that woman’s fault. I have an undeniable hate toward her. I don’t like seeing her when she gets home from work, I don’t like her hair, her face, or the tapping her heels make when she walks up her steps and onto her porch.

I don’t like to see her breathing.

It has been several times when I wake up and see a figure moving away from my bed in the shadows. It happens at least once a week since I moved into this place. It seemed nice on the inside, something designed by an interior decorator, even though the outside is old and musky.

I wasn’t expecting to like the new apartment, since it is in a neighborhood full of retirees and people who have nothing better to do than to sit in front of their porches and pick food out of their teeth, but its warm and has everything I need.

I’m on a work assignment for three months. I paid for those three months upfront, since the owner offered me a deal, though she told me that cleaning services were included, but they haven’t showed up yet.

I know about the missing cleaners because something strange happened to me, the very first memorable moment about this place. I had just gotten back from work and when I heard someone moving things around in my room. I saw a stuffed teddy bear right outside the hall and a small heap of dirt, gum wrappers, and other small pieces of trash right by the door.

I figured the cleaning people had gotten there before me and let themselves in, but when I got to the room to say hello, nobody was there. I called the owner’s cell phone and left a message about the cleaners, but she called me back to say that they weren’t going to be able to clean up my place, but that I would be reimbursed. It was odd.

Still confused, I picked up the black bear and put it on my kitchen counter. It was an old raggedy thing, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to throw it out, but figured that it might belong to someone, to one of the owners perhaps, and just kind of set it in plain sight.

That night I heard noises in the kitchen late into the night, like something metallic falling from the counters, like forks or knives. I turned on my lights and went straight for the kitchen. Nothing was on the floor, nothing seemed out of place.

Creeped out, I went back to my room and sat on my bed for a while.

That’s the night when the moving shadow started showing up. At first, it must have been a dream, since I clearly saw somebody, a little girl, floating away from the foot of my bed and toward the bedroom door. I had been woken up by the cries of a cat when I saw the figure. Oh, how I hate cats. They sound like real babies when they cry.

Every week or so after that, I wake up due to a random tap or knock, and my eyes adjust in the dark to catch the dark figure moving away from me, from my side of the bed.

It’s only recently, last week actually, that I got a clear view of what the figure is. It’s a little girl, and she stands there, with a creepy smile, way too big for her face, leaning slowly toward me. One night, trying not to act too scared, hoping she would go away, I rolled over to the side, toward the window and shut my eyes.

Curiosity got the best of me and slowly, I opened them again. And there she was, as if she knew to wait for me. Her pale skin and purple lips in the shape of a broad smile, her dark pupils staring right at me. I could smell her now, the stench was that of rotting meat.

I rolled over to the other side and off the bed, and reached for the light switch. I turned around. She was gone.

I told my coworkers the story, and even though most laughed at first, two days ago every single one of them that I told mentioned that they too started seeing the little girl with the creepy smile. That she just stares. All of the descriptions match.

The coworker that I hang out with the most believes it to be the hidden girl of the objects, which is a legend among the old folk in town. She can make objects appear before showing up herself. They say that she warns you, sometimes with whispers and sometimes with knocks. She wakes you up over a period of weeks before appearing. He sent me a link to a blog post about it, it was published back in 2002, where the author writes in detail every single time the little girl appeared while she slept. She even had a hand drawn image of… it.

The thing is, I had read about this before, from some random Japanese forum I visit sometimes, except she was called the teeth girl, I figured they must have done a poor job translating the story when I read it. It wasn’t very interesting. But this new post shared something else. It came with a warning. On the site, it says: “Share with the affected only.”

With the affected? Only? My coworker told me about a theory that he has, that the story is the trigger. The story brings her to life again. He told me that whoever hears about her will let her keep on living. But I don’t believe in that.

But it’s night time now, and I’m getting ready for bed. She might show up again tonight. Maybe at the foot of my bed… maybe at the foot of…

My classmates finally asked me where I work. I think they were all wondering this because my pants are always dirty, or because sometimes I come in sweaty to class, or because I come in with random things to hold my hair into a messy ponytail.

I work down the street, actually. There’s a cemetery there.

My job is to dig, sometimes by hand with a shovel, and sometimes with the machines. The job is simple, we get the spot location and dig either a standard-sized grave, an infant plot, or an extra large or double one. The dirt is always soft and black, and I’ve lost some weight since I started digging. It’s actually kind of a good workout.

I’ve never been there for an actual burial, but I have been there with the grieving relatives who sneak in there late into the night, sometimes while I’m digging. We have a team of two or three people, and we get these loud bright generator-powered lights to work when it gets dark. Most of the time, however, I had to be there early in the morning, before dawn.

One night, a coworker warned me about an older man who was sitting by a tree and had been there all night. Apparently his wife had just died. He was asked to leave but he refused. They said he didn’t seem dangerous, but to keep my phone on me in case I needed something. The security guard house was located at the entrance and they did their rounds every two hours or so. I know they skipped out on a few, but there were never any major issues.

Plot in section P4.

Another late night.

I dragged the generator to the foot of the hill, started it up, and got to work. That first instance when your shovel hits the ground was always the hardest. It meant that I still had a long ways to go. Then I needed to start up one more before I could call it a night. It’s best not to think about that sometimes.

I was halfway done when I happened to look up toward the tree on the left side of the hill, and sure enough, I could see a figure of a man sitting down, a hat covering his face.

I kept digging, but after a few minutes, I looked to the left again to look at the tree. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t sneak up behind me, I don’t know. Call it paranoia, but us humans can have evil intentions at times. The dead are dead, they don’t bother me.

I finished up, looked at my post-it for the next plot, section P9, number 7. Just up the path, thankfully. It was close enough for me to not have to move the lights, but just rotate them a little to the left.

I didn’t bring my Bluetooth speakers this time, and even though my phone was on full blast, the empty field of the dead seemed to muffle my music. We weren’t allowed to wear earphones. I looked up and with the light now shining toward the tree, I got a clearer view of the man. The light didn’t seem bother him, neither did my music apparently.

I turned my back to the tree and started digging, but I didn’t feel comfortable that way, so I turned to the other side. I didn’t feel comfortable that way either, looking toward the tree and the man.

While standing there, deciding what to do, I felt someone tap my shoulder. I turned around.

Nobody was there.

I looked toward the tree, but the man was still there.

I felt another tap. It was rougher this time. It hurt a little bit.

I quickly turned around again, but no one was there.

I picked up my phone and called the security booth.

“Yes? What’s up?”

“Something weird is happening.”

“What? A ghost?” they replied, jokingly. I didn’t find it funny at all. Since I didn’t respond, they said, “I’ll be right over, where are you?”

I told him, and hung up. I put my shovel down and started walking toward the light setup a little ways down the path. Two steps in and I felt someone pulling on my hair. I screamed.

I tried to turn around and punch and kick at whatever was behind me, desperately trying to get away, but there was nothing there. I started running, cold sweat dripping down my forehead and my hair, now undone, sticking to my neck. I went past the lights and down the path, hoping to find the guard along the way.

I made it all the way to the security booth, but the guard’s golf cart was gone. The door was locked. I was planning on running all the way out into the parking lot, wondering how I would explain myself, when I saw the small headlights of the security guard approaching. I could hear him talking loudly on his phone. He was on with the local police.

It turns out that he went around the hill toward where I told him I was, but couldn’t find me. He got off his cart to ask the man by the tree if he had seen me, but the man didn’t respond. He got closer, repeating his question even louder, but the man wouldn’t budge.

In a last attempt, the guard tapped the man on the shoulder and the man toppled over. He was dead. He was dead the whole time.

—

I didn’t think much of the events of that night until I walked up to the tree with one of my coworkers a few days later. Maybe because I hadn’t gone there because I didn’t want to freak myself out. They couldn’t believe it, and we walked up to check out the scene as I told them my story of that night.

Then, something caught my eye. At the base of the tree was something familiar. It was a yellow plastic bracelet. It was mine. I was using it to hold up my hair that night.

One evening, while sitting in my car, I saw that many of friends were commenting on my Frank’s Facebook wall. Saying things like rest in peace, and words of goodbyes. My friend was dead.

I couldn’t get myself to comment on his wall, but I did message back and forth with his mom and his brother. My best friends have reached out to me to hang out and talk about the whole thing, but I’m not ready.

I was supposed to meet him that day. We were supposed to hang out, but I chose to stay in. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go out, I felt tired and got a headache trying to come up with an excuse not to go.

Now, looking at the last conversation I had with him, I just see his “whatever man, I’ll text you later”. That was his last message to me.

We were supposed to check out the new coffee shop by our high school. They were hosting an open mic night. It was supposed to be a good night, but instead he called up one of his other friends, and got in a car accident and died.

Two nights after he passed, the events started.

My phone would ring at 3am, a phone call from an abnormally long number. I picked up the first couple of times, but all I could hear was static. Once I stopped answering, I started getting random text messages from those similar numbers, but with jumbled up text characters. Like the kind you see on a corrupted computer file.

This went on for three weeks before things got scarier.

One night, I felt someone tug on my sleeve and heard my name being whispered while I was trying to sleep and my phone started ringing once again. It all happened so fast, that I thought I must have still been asleep.

Half awake, I answered it, and I heard my name being whispered. This must be some type of prank, I remember thinking. When I hung up, I kept my eyes open toward the ceiling, barely illuminated by the light coming from the window, when I heard the soft calling sound when you’re the one calling someone and are waiting for them to answer.

I was dialing some number by accident. When I checked who it was, it said I was calling Frank. Instinctively, I tapped on the button to see my call history. I was shocked to see that I had two phone calls with him in the past five minutes. One outgoing, which was my accidental dial, and one incoming, which I had apparently answered earlier. A 14 second phone call. The one where he whispered my name.

I opened up my Facebook Messenger app and tapped on his name. I stared at our last conversation on there. We were talking about some girl he was seeing. His last message on the app was him saying how I was right and that he wasn’t going to call her back. But then…

The three dots appeared. Frank Rosen is typing… then stopped. Then typing again.. I put my phone down and turned on my lights. I wanted him to send the message. Frank, I’m sorry buddy. I wanted him to know that I was going to miss him, even though we never told that to each other, ever.

He stopped typing.

“Frank, I’ll miss you man. Rest in peace.” I typed and hit send.

Since then, I haven’t been woken up by any more calls or messages.

I started writing down my dreams after looking up a dream that I had in a book that would tell you the meanings behind your dreams. I remember that met an old lady, who would come up to me, open up her coin purse, and give a dollar. Sometimes it would be in quarters, sometimes it would be a dollar bill, but I remembered counting it and it was always exactly one dollar.

It happened so often that I started looking up the meaning of the coins, the meaning of money, and the meaning of old people in my dreams. They mentioned positivity and wisdom, but it surely didn’t feel like that. The old lady had no eyes and no teeth, and her purple hand and black veins would be cold as ice when she would place the money in my hand and close it for me into a fist. That feeling still gives me the creeps.

When I told my friend about it, she said that I should start writing these down. To which I replied that it would be of no use since I would forget most of the dream right away. She convinced me to try it anyway, so I grabbed a cheap paper notebook and put it next to my bed. I fell asleep listening to my window fan.

I woke up suddenly, with the noise of cars and honking still in my head from the dreams slowly fading away when I wrote down the following entry:

My taxi driver dropped me off to pick up some flowers to take for his dead brother, I couldn’t say no to the pit stop even though I was in a hurry. He gave me a $20 dollar bill and asked me to pick them up from the flower shop. No parking. Old woman gave me the change. $1. I got to my apartment and he left for cemetery.

Who knew I could remember these things? It’s like a whole other world that makes no sense.

The second morning, I wrote a shorter entry:

I’m sitting waiting for my mom at the laundromat. Playing with a toy gun that shoots rubber bands. It broke and I was trying to fix it. Old lady comes by and says “well aren’t you a good boy?” and gives me a dollar, she closes my hand. Another woman comes in yelling frantically. Her baby has been taken from her car and she was panicking.

And so I kept writing every morning, sometimes in the dark, writing as fast as possible before forgetting what the dream was, and yes, the old lady would always be there.

After about a month, I noticed that the dreams had recurring characters. Sometimes the woman yelling for her baby would run into me as I was leaving for work, or the same taxi driver would pick me up from a meeting. Sometimes I would enter the same flower shop, but in a city I didn’t recognize.

Even in some of the weirder dreams, with impossible scenarios or with my parents driving me somewhere as a child, I would notice the same places. My entries became more detailed, sometimes two or three pages long. I got into the habit of recording them on my cell phone and then passing them onto paper right away.

I became obsessed. These dreams were trying to tell me something, of this place I didn’t know. My friend suggests that I stop writing. Whenever I see a yellow cab, I look for the driver’s face to see if I recognize him.

But I can’t stop writing.

The unknown city in my dreams is familiar now, and I know the names of the streets now. I see the same deliverymen, and the same old lady over and over again. I’m afraid that I’ve created a different world for myself when I sleep. Like I’m living in someone else’s life.

Where is this place and who are these people? What do they want?

I’m afraid that I’ve gotten into something not many people have experienced. I’m forced to turn off my cell phone and wifi at night while I sleep after the most bizarre incident happened about six months ago. You just… never know who is listening, or maybe you don’t want to know what you can’t hear.

There is an application for iPhone that can tell you about your sleep quality. I believe you can also integrate it with your Apple Watch, but I don’t have one, so I just use the phone app itself and rely on the information it gathers. Everything was fine and I was tracking my sleep patterns, until I noticed that the app itself was requesting access to my microphone.

I found it odd, but then the app explained that it doesn’t save recordings and it doesn’t send them anywhere, so I agreed and went to sleep.

In the morning, there was a new notification saying that I snored, and I was curious enough to check them. Sure enough, there I was, at 1:20am, some snoring. I never knew that I snored, but it was good to know.

There’s something eerie about listening to yourself sleep. I kept on with the app as usual. Normally you have to set it right before you go to sleep, and it wakes you up to an alarm at an optimal time, supposedly to prevent you from waking up feeling tired.

One morning, I woke up earlier than usual. Way earlier, actually. At 4:45am. I wasn’t feeling tired, so I went to the bathroom, then for a drink of water and got back to my room. It was still dark out. That’s when I noticed the app had several recordings caught overnight. More snoring.

Curious, I clicked on the first one, at 2:14am, and there I was… breathing loudly. But then, I gasped. In my sleep. I couldn’t believe it, so I replayed the 15 second recording only to hear another voice in there. The voice was a woman’s voice saying “all alone”. I replayed the audio more than 10 times before moving onto the second one.

“Not like that” “All alone”

It kept replaying, over and over. The next recording said the same thing, but the last of the recordings was what really got me. It was… singing.

It was a lullaby. I could hear it faintly, like the wind.

The Backstory For This Episode

Never record yourself while you sleep if you’re not ready to see yourself unconscious, or in a semi-conscious state. We behave differently under varying circumstances, and I guarantee you that you do not behave the way that you expect to. When I was a kid, I used to wake up to the sound of my own voice, mentioning names and warning others to watch out for the “woman with the hat”.

Though there are things that are called “sleep studies” that are meant to help you analyze various medical conditions and are completely normal, it is something very different when a professional is analyzing this versus you analyzing seven to nine hours of dark footage, with the known creep factor. Several documented stories have been told over the years, some passed down, and some shown with hard evidence (video footage). Just how creepy can this get? Let’s find out.

What Happens When You Record Yourself Sleeping

For some, nothing occurs. You twist and turn at night, you may snore for a little bit, and you may hum or sleep-talk. These things are somewhat normal, but during the research for the previous story, I found a few more disturbing cases.

Sleep walking is known to happen to around 3.1% of the population, according to a Sleep Foundation article, so it is something paranormal necessarily, but waking up and standing while fixated on the wall or a window for a period of time may actually be something else.

In this case, a woman in her twenties decided to put a camera, plugged in to her computer with external storage, and set on the night-vision setting (the green-ish footage you see for night recording on TV and Youtube), before going to sleep because she was finding things moved around when she would wake up in the morning. Things like her cell phone would be unplugged and on top of her television, her curtains were wide open, and other things like that.

What she discovered was that in the middle of the night, around 2 or 3am, she would move the blankets from on top of her, sit on the edge of her bed and stare at the wall, then go back to sleep. Then she would wake up again, walk over to the window, open up the curtains, and stare out the window while making some hand gestures that she has no explanation for.

She went to get help from a sleep doctor, but she was happy that it wasn’t anything ghost or haunt related.

Another case that I read about was the woman who would wake up with bruises and scratches. She set a camera at the end of her bed, and went to sleep. This case, however, had a much more sinister explanation, or lack thereof.

As it turns out, the camera caught, over the span of three nights, a scream right before shutting off inexplicably, right around the same time at 3am. There was no explanation of the scratches or bruises, but the scream was not Susan’s (the woman with the issue), but rather a much deeper voice. She still suffers from this and is seeking an explanation.

What is it about 3am?

3am is known as the time that pure evil makes itself known, according to paranormal experts. Some say that the time is mocking the death of Jesus, who died at 3pm in the afternoon.

Should you record yourself sleeping at 3am? You should not record yourself sleeping at 3am if you fear that something paranormal is happening. You may not like what you see.

Should You Record Yourself Sleeping?

There is nothing inherently wrong with recording yourself sleeping, and it might satisfy your curious mind. Keep in mind that your subconscious and unconscious minds may do things that you are not aware that you are capable of doing, such as sleep walking, sleep talking, sitting up on your bed without an explanation, or doing odd things like staring at your partner or at the wall.

There is something mysterious about the realm of sleep that attracts us. In this state, our conscious mind does not pass along judgement and we may discover things about ourselves that we do not normally allow our minds to even see.

But are you ready to see items move next to you, your blankets pulled from the edge of your bed, or a shadow figure sliding out from under your bed and standing next to you while you sleep?

Just kidding.

Or am I?