A Call For Silvia (And Four More Creepy Short Stories)

Spooky season is here at Scary Story Podcast, So I have a bunch of campfire style stories for you right now here we go. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. It was Halloween two thousand and three when this happened. I was with my sister and we had gotten dropped off at the end of one of the main streets of my neighborhood, one where there's a straight shot through a bunch of residential homes. We were supposed to meet up with some friends and make our way back down that street, finally ending up at one of their houses where they would have a small party. Nothing big, just movies, pizza, scaring trigger treaters and stuff like that. It was eight in the evening, which apparently seemed too early because they weren't many trigger treaters out, But then again, the end of that street had a bunch of warehouses before you get to the dead end. As we were making our way back, we noticed a woman on one of the corners who was waiting at the street light. It didn't cross when the walking signs turned. My sister and I were still waiting at the bench of a bus stop for my friends to get dropped off diagonal to where this woman was so we had a clear view. You got to see this lady stand there for a good ten minutes. She kept looking both ways, making it seem like she was crossing, but then waited. My sister got closer to me on the bench and told me how weird she looked. I normally used glasses and wasn't wearing them right then because they would get stained with a face paint I had on. But my sister kept saying that she wouldn't stop smiling. I should have believed her, for at the moment, I only thought that she was either wearing smile makeup or a mask of some sort. I was looking out over the street to see if I spotted my friend's dad's car, because the street was pretty empty and quiet. But then my sister tugged at my sleeve and told me to run. She stood up and pulled me until I got up. When I looked at where she was staring at, I saw this woman walking very quickly toward us diagonally across the street. She was wearing a stained white and long t shirt, like the kind old women wear to go to sleep, or like hospital type clothing. I could tell she had gray hair, so it surprised me just how fast she was rushing toward us. But I was scared at which she was holding, because I couldn't tell if it was a pillow cover to put candy in something much worse. We were running for like five seconds down the block before we heard a loud honk of a semitruck. We turned around to see it crash into the metal fencing of the warehouse parking lot right across the street, completely frozen in place. Just happened so quickly, and even though it was kind of dark out, my sister and I both got to see the red stained clothes of that person in the middle of the street. It was the first time I ever got to see a body twisted in such an unnatural way that it even gave my sister nightmares for years. Neither of us had cell phones back then, so we ended up walking to a frame house and calling our parents to come get us. Much later, we found out that the person that chased us was a guy from high school. He was dressed up as a psych word patient. We didn't know him, but some friends say that they knew who he was. He was only trying to scare us. In my nightmares, I think of how things could have been different if we hadn't run away. Back when I was working for a place literally called Devil's Pizzeria, fitting name. Now, I suppose we used to get this caller that no matter how often our boss blocked his number, he would find a way to call from some other one. He was a weird guy, sounded to bee like in his sixties over the phone and would ask to speak to Sylvia. When I first started working there, I answered the phone and asked another coworker if there was a Sylvia that worked there. He kind of chuckled and asked if it was an old guy on the phone, and he just told me to hang up. Now, I don't like being rude to people, so instead I told him that I thought he had the wrong number, and he was about to explain himself pleading to talk to Sylvia when my coworker came by and hung up the phone by pushing the button on the phone holder. He told me that we had a clear instructions that if he ever called, we're supposed to hang up immediately. I had so many questions, but this guy at work was one of those know it all kinds of people, so I figured I would ask someone else during a break or something. A few days after that, I got to ask one of the guys who worked at the back if there had ever been a Silvia that work there, and what he told me freaked me out because there had indeed been a Silvia there, but she had been killed by her ex boyfriend a long time ago. I was taking journalism classes back then, and this was before true crime was a thing, so I wanted to make a project about her case turn it in at the end of the semester. But I ended up changing my mind after learning that her ex boyfriend had also died while in jail over medical issues, long before I even started getting the phone calls. If he was gone, then who was calling now? What had weired me out the most was that I got these calls more than once, and they continued all the way up until I found this out that her killer had also died. Whenever we would have someone new managing the phones, they would claim to get those calls. I don't think they ever stopped the business, and the phone company tried investigating. Some of the calls were traced to come out from out of state and others without a calor ID. They also got trace to random places, but the instructions always stayed the same. If someone calls for Sylvia, hang up. I used to live in a really old house up until I got to high school, and I'm pretty sure it was haunted. That was nine only moved in, and I remember wanting my parents to walk with me upstairs when it was time to go to bed because I refused to walk there by myself. I am an only child, and I know this is really weird, but my parents had a room set up at the end of the hall that had a small bed and a few toys. It wasn't allowed in most of the time, except for when my mom was cleaning it and asked me to go in there with her because she was afraid of it too. One time, when we were both in there, something weird happened. That room had a really cool train set on top of one of the desks, and I remember trying to reach for it. Before I did, it turned on and I stood there watching it loop around twice and then stop. My mom freaked out and got us both out of the room, but didn't tell me why. I heard her explain it to my dad when he got home later that day and he got up from the dinner table, He went upstairs and came back confirming that the train had no batteries. I watched them both look at each other for a while and then look at me for my reaction, But honestly, all I could feel at the moment was relief and knowing that now they knew that I wasn't making anything up and that there was something weird in that house. A couple of months after that, my mom and I were home alone on a Saturday afternoon when he heard movement coming from that room. Clearly. She turned off the TV and we both heard footsteps. They were running from where that room was and down the hallway upstairs. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the front door, and that's where we sat on an old couch we had on the porch until my dad came home. This time it was scarier, I think, just seeing how frightened my mom was really freaked me out. I asked her about the room and what she thought it was, and I didn't understand her completely at the time, just the part she said about how the owner of the house wanted us to take care of that room while we lived there. When my dad got home and we all went inside again, he went up to check it out and said at the closet door inside that room was open and that some of the boxes that had been in there were now on the floor. Those boxes were some of my old toys. Looking back at it now, everything makes sense. Well, everything had an explanation, except for the haunted part, Like it would make sense that whatever was in that room didn't want any of my stuff in there, or that it didn't want me touching the toys or whatever, so we just sort of followed those rules. We didn't have much trouble after that, although Mom still asked me to go with her whenever she cleaned it. It was like that until our lease ended. The owner of the house, who was pretty old already had died and had left the house, who has grown children who were now planning on selling it. My dad told me much later now that we retell this story, that he didn't want to buy the house because even though it wasn't a condition for purchase, we all knew they would have to keep that room for whatever was living in there. Ever, that he would rather have someone else deal with it. While I was in college, I had a job working for a company that fixed monitors and other computer hardware. The only thing I was allowed to work on there were the power units and replacing the speakers or other minor things on the monitors. Anything more than that I was supposed to call the team leader, who was this super nerdy guy who had started his own business when he was even younger. Well, one time, we got this girl who came in super nervous about her broken computer monitor. When someone like this comes in all nervous and stuff, we usually know what it is, and they're usually worried about their search history or some virus that they got after downloading certain content online. But this girl had only brought in her monitor. Our story was pretty wild, and to this day it's still the creepiest thing I have ever witnessed. Aim was that there was a shape that kept appearing on her screen, and no matter what she did, she couldn't get rid of it. She showed me a picture of it, and I saw it clear as day, the face of an old woman, wide mouthed and a wrinkled face. Literally looked like she was screaming at you. When I'm saying this was clear. I mean you could literally see the reflection of someone in the darkness of her eyes, like they already looked watery and really shiny as is, but in front of me at just an old monitor, a common brand that's still in business today. I didn't know what to do with the information, so I called up the team leader and asked him what he thought of it. It burned impression on the monitor. He said something that meant that there had been an image, either a background image or something that was left on the same spot for too long, giving it enough time for the tiny little lights or pixels on the screen to burn and keep the same image there even when it was no longer there. The girl had been sitting on the waiting area by the desk of the shop while I took the call, so I asked her if it looked like something she had seen on her screen before, or if it was her screensaver or something. By her reaction, I knew that it wasn't something she wanted to look at, so I decided to test it. We plugged in another CPU, turned it on, and everything seemed to be working as normal. They opened up a notes program, a game and even the web browser, and nothing seemed to be triggering it. But I asked her to click around and open what she would normally open. Neither of us could see this impression of the woman. Honestly, at this point that was kind of skeptical, but I knew she was feeling bad about it, so instead I suggested that she bring along her CPU so we could really test it out. She brought it back later that same day with another one of her friends who carried it in for her. He also supported her claims of this impression of a woman's face on the monitor, explaining even more of the other things that they had tried so that they had tested before it in, including trying out other monitors that their friends had let them borrow. The woman still showed up, so we turned it on, even dimmed the lights at the shop to see if I could see this impression of the woman on the screen. Nothing. I kind of thought it was a joke, and I had a bunch of other things to work on, so I tried to convince them that maybe it was the angle of the light in the room, where maybe you a poster reflecting off of it, something that they both denied. I was really curious about this too, so when they asked me to go check it out, that they had the computer set up in the corner of their shriff apartment, I said yes that I would go that same night, not even sure of what to expect or if I was walking into the prank of the year. I was around ten at night when I finally showed up. The same monitor in CPU had been set up where it would normally be, and it was already turned on when I walked in. The guy from earlier rushed me in and told me to sit at the desk chair, and there it was. The thing was much creepier than they had mentioned. It was clear as day, like a mirror reflection of a woman completely frozen. She was pale and had dark eyes, with the very clear reflection in her eyes. It wasn't faded out or anything, but extremely clear when the screen turned dark, like when a video was loading. I moved the monitor around from left to right and actually got to see the whole image shift for just an instant before I went back to the same woman. The girl who had brought in the monitor kept her eyes on me as I reacted to this thing, trying my best to debunk or figure it out right there in front of both of them, but I had no answers. All I could think of was to get up close to the image and see the reflection of her eyes. I got it close to the screen very slowly and asked both of them to turn off the lights in the living room. We all huddled together as I got close to it, my face now directly in front of the screen with a dark screensaver to make the reflection easier to see. But as I did, my heart started beating faster and louder, and those eyes I could see three faces. I gasped and threw myself back in the chair, freaking both of them out. I don't know if what I saw in those eyes was a normal reflection of ourselves in that monitor, or literally of just her eyes. I tried to take a screenshot of the screen, but there was nothing that showed up there either. We had no explanation, and even when I brought it up to the team leader to see what we could do, he said to just get it replaced with one of the newer flat monitors with less reflection. We had a couple that we had fixed, but were no longer needed by the original owner, so we sold it to them for twenty bucks and called it a day. They said it worked. Now this is going to sound crazy, but the only thing that changed between those monitors is that the ones that they had tried all had the glossy reflective screens, while the ones that we sold them did not. It made me think that there was something in their living room all along, and not the monitor itself, something that's still there. We still use that monitor around the office where the invoice computer is. It's the one we print from. No one had any trouble with it. In the shop. There was an old tree in the middle of the apartments where we used to live that all the kids were afraid of. There had been a kid who had seen a pair of legs dangling from the branches one night when he was out there playing by himself. He was bouncing around to basketball, and he had gotten so scared that he couldn't talk for several days. The family moved doubt in the first month we had been there, so I only got to see him around a few times, but he always refused to go outside and play, so we never really became friends. His mom was a real talker though, and had told my mom and some of the other people from the other units all about the incident. She actually had the police investigate in everything, but nothing came of it. Ever since then, the rest of us kids would scare ourselves talking about it when we would stay out after it got late. It all changed one night, though, but the three of us all saw something we couldn't explain. I had two friends, Edgar, who was eight my age, and Anthony, who was a fifth grader, so of around ten, we knew each other from school, and thanks to a couple of other friends who also lived in the same complex. For a while we got into glowing the dark stuff like stars and rubber balls and all this other stuff that we would hold up to a flashlight then later throw around in the courtyard for a type of I don't know, treasure hunt. It had gotten dark out, and even though we normally stayed away from that tree, I knew that no one would try to look there for the treasure, so the timer would run out and I would win. Honestly, I can't remember the rules of our game, but that was the gist of it. I walked up toward the tree practically through a little alien head that glowed in the dark near the roots, and ran away, getting to my other two friends before the time ran out. Now they were supposed to look for it. Yeah, I think that's how the game went. So I got back to base and they started searching, and I was sitting there against the wall by the millboxes, staring at the timer when I heard both of them shriek loudly. Two of the neighbors got out and yelled, asking them to rush inside, and I ran out toward the courtyard as the doors were shutting. I looked around me and watched all of these window curtains move almost at the same time, looking toward me. I looked back toward my door, but in order to get to it, I was supposed to run right by that tree or either around it toward the dark parking lot. I panicked and couldn't get my legs to move, so I stared ahead and watched as this figure climbed down from the tree, gripping to the sides of the truck slowly. It was too dark for me to see what it was, but I watched as a glow in the dark toy floated back up toward the tree. In the darkness, and it disappeared in the branches. It was then when I felt someone pull me from my arms and shoulders and carried me toward my other two friends. Edgar was trying to laugh over his tears, while Anthony looked just as in shock as I did. The neighbors went to get our parents, and they walked over to get us one by one. The police showed up about an hour after that, and they searched the area along with us friends and our parents, where we explained what we had seen. It turns out that for Edgar and Anthony it had been much worse. They say that they heard a man whistling from the tree and they got to see his face, a bearded, bald man with large red eyes. The police never found anything and said that it was most likely someone who had sneaked in and tried to scare us. The rest of the kids in the neighborhood found out about the story too, and we had something cool to talk about for the rest of that year. But no matter how much I try to figure it out even now, I still have no idea how a person would be able to crawl down a tree trunk like that and then go back up last I checked that tree is still there and the stories still circulate with some details added. I hope children still avoid that area at night. You're following the show, I'll be back next week with more stories. In the meantime, find our other creepy shows from Scary FM right here on the same app. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.