Podcast

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.