A Friend of a Friend in Los Angeles

[00:00:00] Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Today's episode has several stories, allegedly passed down from a friend of a friend. Things that could happen to you, too. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story.

[00:00:24] It's one of those places nobody thinks about. Beat up old factory that makes rubber parts or whatever. Way past one of those freeway exits nobody uses. It only runs at night now, a skeleton crew. And this happened to my friend Angela. She worked there for a few months, just trying to save up some money. It wasn't a great job, but it was steady and it paid. Anyway, every night she would clock out around 2.15 in the morning.

[00:00:50] Her car was parked a couple of blocks down, past this chain-link gate. Just dark streets and that hum from the factories that never totally shuts off. One night, she tells her roommate that she's heard something weird while walking to her car. It was like crying. A little kid, maybe. Really faint, almost like it was being carried on the wind. She looked around, nothing. Again, the place is empty. At night, just warehouses and broken streetlights.

[00:01:20] Second night, same thing. Same spot. Right by the gate. Crying again. Still soft. Still no one there. She starts thinking that maybe it's a cat or something. You know, high-pitched and sad-sounding. But on the third night, things got messed up. She finds his little shoe sitting right by the gate. It was dirty and old, like it had been there for a while. One of those tiny Velcro sneakers. You know what I'm talking about? Toddler-sized.

[00:01:47] She picks it up, looks around, and nobody. And then the crying starts again. But this time, it's not behind her. It's right in front of her. She looks up, and there's this little girl standing just outside the gate. Barefoot. Soaked from head to toe, wearing this white dress that's all torn up at the bottom. Her hair stuck to her face, like she'd just climbed out of a river. Or something like that. And her eyes, gone. Just black holes.

[00:02:16] Like someone punched them out of her skull and never filled them in. Angela says she couldn't move. Couldn't even breathe. And the girl just stood there, staring at her. Or whatever it was doing without eyes. She blinked, and the girl was now on the other side of the gate. On the inside. Right there with her. And that's when it started. The screaming. The girl never made a sound. It was coming from everywhere else. All around her.

[00:02:44] Dozens of voices, like whispering and crying and shouting all at once. Like they were inside her head, but outside too. She panicked, dropped her keys, and ran back inside the factory. She locked herself in the break room, and her co-worker found her 20 minutes later, shaking and pale and crying. She never went back. She quit that night. Wouldn't even go to pick up her last check until somebody went with her. She told her roommate everything.

[00:03:12] Even tried to show her a video that she'd taken. She started recording on her phone the night before, just to prove that she wasn't going crazy. But the video was useless. It was too dark until the very end, with one frame only of her walking toward the gate. Behind her, clear as day, a hand, reaching through the fence. Angela moved to Bakersfield with the rest of her family not long after. She said that she still sees a girl sometimes,

[00:03:42] imagines her, not like full on, but in reflections. Car windows, puddles, turned off TVs, just for a second. But she's always looking at her. And the gate's still there, if you're wondering. Same spot. Some folks who work around there say that if you walk by it, after two in the morning, you can still hear her crying. And if you stop, if you look through the gate long enough, sometimes, something looks back.

[00:04:10] My brother's friend, Marcus, used to do food delivery in LA. Worked the graveyard shift, mostly downtown and West Lake. He wasn't really a people person, didn't mind being alone. Driving at night calmed him down, especially when he wasn't dealing with traffic or customers breathing down his neck. Anyway, this all started with what seemed like a glitch. One night,

[00:04:40] he gets an order at 1.12am. Weirdly specific time, he remembered that. To this apartment building on Commonwealth, kind of tucked between two old laundromats and a run-down liquor store. The order's for Unit 3B. He drives over, no problem, quiet street, drops the food at the door, knocks, no one answers, and the app says, leave at the door. So he does. He takes a photo, walks away, and 10 minutes later, boom, $15 tip.

[00:05:10] Not bad. Next night, same address, same time, new order though, different name, and still, 3B. He delivers again, and no one's home. No one ever is. Food's still there from the night before though, untouched. But the app clears it. Tip goes through, no complaints. And it keeps happening. Third night, fourth, and by the end of the week, Marcus has delivered to 3B

[00:05:39] six times. All different names, different food, but the same unit. No lights on, no sign of life inside, and by now, there's a pile of delivery bags outside the door, still untouched. So he tells my brother, it's like I'm delivering to a ghost. But here's the thing. The app never flags it. No errors, no refunds, nothing. It's like someone keeps placing orders and forgetting about them. But also,

[00:06:09] tipping big. Like too big. $20, $40, once even $60. And I thought there was a limit to those things. And you would think that's a win, right? But it started to bother him. He tried looking into the names on the orders, and they weren't repeats. Each one was different. But not a normal thing either. Like half of these names sounded fake. One was just a first name and no last initial. One had a random string of letters, like someone was testing the system.

[00:06:39] He talked to the maintenance guy one night, older guy, barely paying attention. And Marcus asks, hey, does anyone actually live there in 3B? And the guy shrugs. He says, been empty for a while. Maybe a couple years. Marcus double checks. He goes back through his order history. Six nights of deliveries to a unit nobody lives in. So now, he's wondering, who's ordering the food? And why hasn't the app

[00:07:08] flagged the account? Why keep sending food to a place where nobody ever opens the door? He figures maybe it's some scam. Maybe someone's laundering stolen cards through food apps. Maybe it's a bot testing addresses. But every time he thinks that, he asks himself, why only him? Why does he keep getting these orders? That's when it gets worse. He starts noticing the orders show up on his queue

[00:07:36] before he logs onto the app. Like, he'll be opening his phone just to check messages, and there it is. Order request already ringing. And it's always the same. 1-12 AM. And always 3B. So he tries rejecting one. The next night, he gets two. One at 1-12 and one at 1-17. Then his other deliveries start rerouting. A pizza run in Echo Park randomly redirects mid-route to a new drop-off.

[00:08:06] 3B on Commonwealth. And it's not just the app. One night, he swears he sees someone waiting in the hallway as he's leaving the food. Not outside the unit, but far down the corridor, just standing near the stairs. Shadowed. Facing him. And when he blinks, the person's gone. He says nothing ever happened. No threats. No messages. But he started to feel like he was being watched. Like someone was studying

[00:08:36] what he would do and how long he would keep playing along. A couple times, he tried sending messages, but nobody responded. He stopped sleeping well. He also started dreaming about endless apartment halls, rows of identical doors, and food. Just food. Eventually, he decides to stop delivering to that address. He uninstalls the app and deletes his account. The next day, he gets a text. No name, no number, just one of those bracket names.

[00:09:06] I'm not sure if you've seen one. But it said, drop off, missed. 1.12 a.m. He shrugged it off, thinks maybe he imagined it, and then the money starts showing up. His bank account starts getting deposits. No explanation, no sender, a couple of hundred dollars at first, and then more. He calls his bank, and they say the payments are legit, coming from a verified vendor. Same one that runs the app. He never reinstalled it,

[00:09:36] never took another order, but the money kept coming. He said he felt like a lab rat that wandered off course, but they still wanted to reward him, keep him comfortable, maybe keep him quiet. He moved about six months later. No explanation, couldn't say where. He told my brother he needed to reset, said that LA had gotten weird. But here's the part that sticks with me. A guy I met recently, who also does late night deliveries,

[00:10:05] he tells me about this address that keeps showing up in his app. So of course, I started asking him questions, and eventually, he kind of remembered it was in Westlake, near Commonwealth. Always comes through around 1.12 a.m., or so he said, and always asks for drop-off at Unit 3B. That, I remember. I asked him if he ever took the order, and he said, once. But when I got to the door, there were already three other bags sitting there,

[00:10:35] like someone had beat me to it. He said he didn't remember seeing another driver on the way up, no one leaving, just silence. He left the food, took the photo, and walked away fast. Now he skips the order when it pops up. Says he doesn't know what it is, but it feels off, like it's not really a person on the other end. I don't know what to tell you. Maybe it's just a system glitch, a weird string of coincidences. Maybe someone's

[00:11:04] gaming the apps in a way that no one's figured out yet. But if you're ever out there delivering, and 3B comes up, just skip it. Whatever's behind that door, if anything, it doesn't eat. It just waits. I don't usually tell people this story. Most wouldn't believe it anyway. I used to dispatch for a small plumbing company

[00:11:33] in San Bernardino. Nothing fancy. Four trucks, one office, and a staff of guys who had been fixing busted toilets and water heaters for longer than I'd been alive. My job was mostly in the office, phones, scheduling, handling late night calls when the emergency line rang after hours. Sometimes though, I would go out myself. Like if a tech called off or we were backed up or if a customer was just really angry and we didn't want to lose the job. I wasn't licensed

[00:12:03] to do repairs though, but I knew enough to walk a site, check out an issue, and make a call about how urgent it really was. And that's how I ended up at the house on Euclid Avenue. Late March, cold night, it was quiet around 10.45pm. The woman had called three times, said something was wrong with her pipes. Not inside, but in the backyard near the shed. She said she could hear scraping and the water in the guest bathroom was running brown and then stopping entirely.

[00:12:32] She also said something about the smell. Like meat, she said. I wasn't planning to go, but we were booked solid the next day and I figured if I checked it out myself, maybe we could reshuffle the morning crew and get ahead of it. So I drove out. It was a single-story place, end of a cul-de-sac. Chain-link fence out front, porch light flickering, one of those houses that looks like time forgot it. Faded paint, concrete lawn. The woman who answered was older,

[00:13:02] maybe mid-sixties. Short, heavy set, hair tight back, tight. She looked tired. I introduced myself and she said her name was Helen. I don't need anyone to fix it tonight, she said. I just want someone else to hear it, to see that I'm not crazy. She led me around the side of the house. The backyard was unlit, just a plastic motion sensor over the back door that didn't work. So I used my flashlight. The shed sat maybe

[00:13:32] twenty feet from the house, tucked into a corner where the fence met the trees, metal, rusted, and about to fall over. As we got closer, the smell hit me. She hadn't been exaggerating. It wasn't sewage though, it was sweeter, wet, rotting, like a full trash bin left out in the sun for too long. I asked her where the plumbing lines ran and she pointed, a shadow trench just behind the shed, barely visible in the grass.

[00:14:02] I told her I would take a quick look and she didn't follow. The shed had a small gap between its back wall and the chain link fence, maybe three feet wide. And that's where the trench ended, or maybe started, depending on how you looked at it. That's also where I heard it. A kind of shuffling, low to the ground. It was soft, but steady, like something dragging its limbs through wet leaves. I crouched down, a little hesitant now, but I angled my flashlight

[00:14:32] over the gap. And that's when I saw it, only for a second. Pale skin, long, thin arms, elbows bent the wrong way, knees tucked into its chest like it had folded itself in half. It was hunched, completely still, its head low and I could see its face. Only that its skin didn't reflect light, like it absorbed it or something, like it didn't want to be seen. And then it moved,

[00:15:01] quick and fluid, and it backed up into the darkness behind the shed without a sound, not even a rustle this time. I stood there frozen, not scared exactly, not yet, but uncomfortable in a way that I had never felt before. Something about it didn't make any sense. It wasn't the shape or the way it moved, but how it felt like it had been watching me first. I walked back to the house. I told Helen the smell might be a dead animal near the piping

[00:15:30] and we would send someone out first thing in the morning. She nodded and didn't look surprised. I drove home with the windows down. That smell clung to me the whole ride back. Next morning, I checked our system. There was no job listed for that address. No record of a Helen. No invoice, no call history. Even the emergency call log, which is automatic by the way, was blank. Just three skipped timestamps around 1030 like the phone had rung

[00:16:00] but nobody picked up. I didn't say anything to the team. I figured maybe I had logged it wrong. We were slammed that week and I had been working 12 hours and wasn't sleeping much. Still, it bugged me. Enough that the following weekend I drove back out to the house. Same street, same number. Only the house looked different. The windows were boarded. The grass was dead. Mail was piled in the box like no one had touched it in months. The porch light

[00:16:30] was broken. The gate was padlocked shut. I checked the county records online. The property had been vacant for over a year. I kept it to myself. What was I going to say? Hey, I saw a pale thing behind a shed at a house that doesn't exist anymore. Ah, anyway, a few weeks passed. I started sleeping better, convinced myself I had gone to the wrong house, wrong street. Easy mistake when you're tired and in the dark. And then the smell came back.

[00:17:00] Faint at certain job sites, in the van, the office bathroom ones. That same sick, sweet rot drifting in and out like it followed me. And then about two months later, I was covering the late shift. Phones were dead and I was sorting paperwork. Just after midnight, the emergency line rang. The caller ID was blocked. I answered. Silence. For a long time.

[00:17:31] And then the faintest whisper. Not a voice exactly, more like breathing. And I hung up. And check this out, logged as coming from another phone from our system in the same building. A few nights after that, I had a dream. I was back in the yard, standing by the shed. And only this time, the thing was facing me. I couldn't see its face, but I knew it could see mine. I ended up quitting two months later.

[00:18:01] I moved north. New job, new town, smaller company. It was too much trouble down there anyway. I haven't smelled that rot since. I haven't taken another emergency call either. But sometimes, when I'm walking near a fence line or when the grass dies in a narrow path leading up to the trees, I think about that space behind the shed. And I wonder if it's still out there, crouched and waiting. Or if it came with me.

[00:18:39] I don't really believe in fate or guardian angels or whatever. Never have. But I do believe in coincidence. And sometimes, if I'm being honest with myself, I wonder if coincidence is the only reason I'm here. This happened about two years ago. I'd just moved into a cheap apartment in a rougher part of San Bernardino. It was all I could afford at the time. Building was old. Smelled like old carpet and bleach. No elevator, just four floors, chipped tile, and tenants who mostly kept

[00:19:09] their heads down. The kind of place where no one makes eye contact unless they absolutely have to. That was in Unit 6D, the top floor. The last one at the end of the hallway. You had one of those really bad wooden front doors that never sits just right on the frame. You had to give it a shoulder shove to get it open sometimes. Same when you closed it. It just stuck a little. Like the wood had swelled years ago and nobody ever bothered to fix it. It was annoying,

[00:19:38] but I got used to it. The only person I really ever talked to was Doug, the property manager. The guy was probably in his 50s, thinning hair, always in a polo shirt with the building's logo embroidered on the chest. He was decent, polite, didn't act like he was doing you a favor by fixing stuff. I saw him around a lot, usually with a clipboard or a plunger. We weren't friends, but we said hey when we passed in the hall. Around the second month

[00:20:07] I was living there, things started feeling a little strange. It started with little things. Notices pinned to the lobby corkboard, remember to lock your doors, report suspicious activity, that kind of stuff. Doug told me someone had been breaking into the buildings in the neighborhood, messing with locks, looking for easy targets. He said the break-ins weren't violent, at least not yet. There was no forced entry, no one hurt, but people would wake up and realize things were moved.

[00:20:37] The fridge would be open, the closet door cracked. Sometimes nothing was even stolen, just shifted. Like whoever was there didn't want stuff, they just wanted to be inside. Doug was taking it seriously. I caught him walking in the hallways at like 6 in the morning one day, checking each door, writing stuff down on his clipboard. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept. And he said, just making sure everyone's secure.

[00:21:08] I still remember that voice. The building was quiet for a few weeks, and then one night, around 1.30 a.m., I was half asleep on my couch, watching dumb videos with headphones in. I lived alone, didn't have a pet, and the only noise came from the occasional plumbing groan, or the neighbor coughing through the wall. But that's when I heard the knock. It was soft. Three quick taps, almost polite, just tap, tap, tap.

[00:21:38] I paused the video and sat up, headphones still around my neck. I wasn't expecting anyone, definitely not at that hour. I waited, thinking maybe I imagined it. Then it came again, slightly louder this time. Tap, tap. I got up and walked to the door. I remember reaching for the handle, ready to open it, because why wouldn't I? I was half asleep, again, not thinking. But the door stuck,

[00:22:07] like always. I pulled harder, gave it a little yank, and still, it didn't bunge. Now, I don't know why I stopped. Normally, I would have given it a full body pull and popped it right open. But something about the way the knob turned without catching, something about that knock, I don't know, I just stood there. The knock came again, this time slower, and then nothing. I backed away, I didn't say anything, didn't look through the peephole,

[00:22:37] I always forgot I was there. Eventually, I just went back to the couch and sat there, still half awake, waiting to hear footsteps. But I didn't. I must have fallen asleep eventually, because the next morning, there were cop cars out in the front, yellow tape around the back. Doug had been found dead around two in the morning. blunt force trauma, no witnesses. They found his clipboard, and his phone was missing. Police said it looked like

[00:23:06] a robbery, maybe a break-in gone wrong. Rumors spread fast. One neighbor said that she had seen someone in a hoodie walking in the halls around 145. Said that they were tall, said they moved in a weird way, fast, but kind of hunched, like they were trying not to be seen. Another tenant said that the door had fresh scratches near the lock. Nothing big, just little marks like someone had tried a key that didn't quite fit.

[00:23:36] I didn't say anything at first. What was I supposed to say? Hey, someone knocked on my door and I didn't open it? But a couple days later, I noticed something. The peephole, the one I never used, had been covered over from the outside with a piece of scotch tape, perfectly centered. I peeled it off and stared through. See nothing but the hallway and the neighbor's door across from mine. I started thinking about how close I'd come to opening that door.

[00:24:06] If it hadn't stuck, if I hadn't hesitated, if I'd just been a little more awake, maybe a little more polite, would I have opened it? Would I have been next? The worst part, I wasn't cautious, I wasn't smart, I was just lucky. That thought stuck with me more than anything else. About a week after that, I was sweeping by the door. I don't know why, I just couldn't sit still. I noticed something on the frame,

[00:24:36] just near the latch. It was a scratch. It was thin, shallow, but long, like someone dragged something sharp against it. A screwdriver, maybe. Or a knife. I moved out a few months later when my lease was up. I told myself it was just time for a change. I found a cheaper spot across town, better lighting, closer to work. But the truth is, I didn't like sleeping near that door anymore. I still think about Doug. He was a decent guy,

[00:25:05] probably saw something that night he shouldn't have. Maybe he'd try to stop it. Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think about how random it was, how nothing saved me, not instincts, not awareness. Just a sticky old door in my own laziness. The new place I live now, the door opens smoothly, doesn't even creak. But sometimes, when I'm turning the handle late at night,

[00:25:36] I almost wish it didn't. Scary Story Podcast is written and produced by me, Edwin Covarrubias. I've gotten a few stories from you for my show, Paranormal Club. We might need a couple more to get the full episode, but thank you to those who have emailed me with their true encounters. It's going to make a really good episode. Anyway, as always, if you're following the show, I will tell you more stories next week.

[00:26:07] Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.