Creepy Short Stories: Meet Benjamin and The Roach Room Nightmare

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. In these two short scary stories, we have real life scenarios that could happen to you. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. Back when I was working in Colorado, I stayed at a house near very large golden fields. It felt like it had come out of a movie since some from New York and I rarely got to see the horizon like I did back then. There were other things I liked aside from the wide open spaces, things like how everybody there seemed to be into outdoor activities. But since I was there temporarily, I didn't have a bicycle or a canoe like apparently seemed to be a requirement for the cars in the area. One of my work friends had a bike that they lent me, and I started by riding around the fields and the houses. It's a different feeling you get by just walking around new neighborhoods with different sidewalks and styles of pretty much everything. One day after work, I started riding around the block on that old bike, squeaking all round the shady streets. If I went a little ways down the road, I would end up by the edge of the golden fields. Not sure if they were wheat or something else, but they looked amazing with the glowing sunset light and the shade of the nearby mountains. I would spend some times leaning against the bike, watching as a car in the distance would approach. I lost track of time and the area had started to get dark, so off I went squeaking back to the block where my rental was. As I passed through the street just before getting to mine, I saw a boy, probably around ten or eleven years old, waving at me. As I passed by, he stepped out into the street behind me, so I stopped and turned around to ask if he needed anything. He waved at me to come to him. My curiously approached as he introduced himself as Benjamin and said that my bike was squeaky. I looked over to his front yard. His own bike was flipped upside down, apparently he was working on it. I was a little surprised by the outgoing personality of this kid, especially since where I was from, nobody really talked to anybody, but this kid seemed well mannered. So I introduced myself too. I asked him if he knew what I could do to fix the bike, and he said to use a certain brand of liquid to add to the wheel and to the chain. He said he would go get it, so he stepped back into his front yard and went to the side of the house. But I stood there for a while. I would say about ten minutes before I yelled out for Benjamin, but it wouldn't come out. I figured I would catch him the next day, so I simply got back on my bike, looking back at the house to see if he would come out to the street again. When I got to my house, I locked up the bike and went inside. I would pass by that house on my way to work, the house where Benjamin lived, and I would see his bike flipped upside down on the yard. It was that same red bicycle and a small milk rate next to it, the one that he had used to sit on while he worked. The whole time I was there. I tried to get on the bike to see if I could go on one of those longer bike trails, but my squeaky bike and lack of knowledge on pretty much everything bike repair terrified me. What if I got a flat tire, or if something else happened while out on the trails. It would help me, but I still kept going out to the roads, sometimes to watch the sunset and other times to find new places to eat or shop around just to kill time. I forgot all about Benjamin until I saw him again. He was out by the front yard, so I waved at him and he waved back, asking if my bike had gotten fixed and where I was going. He said that he knew of a few cool places to ride bikes and to wait for him while he got his stuff. I wanted to tell him that it was okay, that I needed to get back to my home, but he ran off to the side of the house before I could even see a word. So I stayed there again for over ten minutes, and I considered leaving and later apologizing for it, until I finally made up my mind and started pedaling away. And that's when I heard it. Wait. I heard his voice right behind me. I stopped my bike and looked back before realizing that Benjamin was next to me, laughing and asking where I was going. I told him that I was going home and that it was getting dark so that he should go home too, that we could write around some other time, but he just stood there, smiling at me. Then his expression changed. I can't go home, he told me. He was now looking at the ground. Then he started walking back to his house without saying anything else. I felt terrible, but also it was a little weird for a kid to be out riding by with the person he didn't know, since he was a kid and I was some stranger an adult. Still, I went home with that feeling. I didn't see Benjamin again until the day when I left that town. I passed by the house sometimes, but his upside down bicycle would be there without him. I figured I might as well say bye or apologize to him before I left. So with my car, I'll load it up with everything. The bike now back on my co worker's house. I pulled up to the sidewalk in front of Benjamin's house and walked up to the door. Maybe I could speak with his parents, maybe warned them to watch out for him a little bit more. I grew up with the whole don't speak the stranger's things, so maybe that was different. There. An older woman opened the door and greeted me, asking how she could help me, But when I told her about Benjamin, she changed her demeanor completely and told me that it was best if I left. I didn't understand, but angrily pointed at my car and asked me to leave her alone. Margaret, some one set from inside the house. It was a man walking up toward me, greeting me and asking if everything was okay. He was a little nicer and explained something to me that sent goose bumps down my neck. Turned out that the upside down bicycle had been set in the yard as a type of decoration, something to remember. I left the house, thanking the man for his time. The woman had already gone away. My mind wasn't all there. When I got back to my car. My arms were shaking as I started up the engine. I looked over to the yard as Benjamin came out from the side of the house, waving at me. But then I thought back of the man's words about Benjamin, the disappearance, and how Benjamin was found. Benjamin laughed as he walked up closer toward me, calling my name. But that couldn't be happening. Benjamin wasn't there. Benjamin was dead, and he had been dead for decades. I pulled away, feeling disoriented and with a feeling that wouldn't leave me. I looked at the rear view mirror. Benjamin was gone. The second story is called Under My Skin, and it's going to begin right after this. Heads up if you're afraid of insects, because the story has some of that material. Anyway, stay with me. It was three am and someone was tapping on the wall again. This house was loud enough already. I would wake up whenever anybody went to the bathroom in the middle of the night or opened literally anything from a cabinet to a faucet. The sounds squealed and echoed through that house, and aside from putting me in a terrible mood, the next morning, I developed a new fear. I used to rent a room in an old house the few other college students. Nobody knew each other, and it was the start of the year, so things were generally quiet during the day. My parents said that it was a house settling, something that I still don't know exactly what it means. The sounds were muffled, like soft scratches through a heavy sweater. Combined with that brief moment like when your earphones get caught on something while you're still wearing them, it doesn't seem like a big deal to most people, and though some would simply recommend wearing earplugs and move on, I have to say that imagining something in my ear like that all night would drive me crazy. The room next to mine was empty, though it had been used as storage for some of the other girls that moved in, so some of my theories involved rats invading the room or worse, the walls, and I have to say it really got me. I would wake up in the middle of the night after having some of the most vivid nightmares of my life, and some I would see dark eyes coming from the closet and crawling toward me, the tale of the thing dragging behind the ball of oily black fur. Then I would wake up, and then scratching would continue, yet I would be unable to move. At some point, the muffled scratches would go away, but I never found out how they left. Eventually, one of my friends from a journalism class moved into the room next to mine, and I was glad to have someone else that I knew in that house, even just to complain about the noises with, since literally nobody else mentioned how loud that house was. Ever, we all just sort of avoided each other. One time while we weren't in the house, I asked her about the noises, and to my surprised she said she hadn't actually heard them. Then told me something I wasn't expecting. She asked if I had been having nightmares because I would scream in the middle of the night for no reason and completely out of nowhere. It made me think if people weren't avoiding each other but instead were simply avoiding me. I felt embarrassed, but most of all, I felt confused about myself screaming. I apologized awkwardly and explained to her that, yeah, I had actually been having nightmares, but I never screamed in them, that I was very sorry for that, that I was trying to figure out what was happening too. Even though she didn't hear the scratches, she definitely believed me when I explained to her what they sounded like, and she suggested that we switched rooms one day just to see if she heard them, And so our experiments started with only a single night. Out of my room, I slept like a rock, and so I heard a faint scream from my bedroom right through the shared wall. I got up and ran to the hallway and into my room. I turned on the lights, but Hannah completely ignored me, staring only at the closet door with her eyes wide open. Hannah, I whispered, wake up. She looked up at me, confused. She looked around the room as if trying to find out where she was for the first time. There's something in here, she said. We stayed up for part of the night, but eventually we both went to Hannah's room and stayed there until morning. We both had voice recorders for our reporting assignments, and Hannah had the unthinkable idea to try to catch the sounds on tape. It was strange to think about that recording sounds while you sleep. It was worth a shot to get to the bottom of the situation. The following night, Hannah brought her blankets to my room and we set up a recorder under the bed. I placed one close to the wall. At around midnight, we turned off the lights and turned on the recorders. That night, I had the worst nightmare of them all. I looked at my arm and saw a bump over my wrist. I felt around my right arm and soon noticed another bump by my elbow. It was about the size of an eminem sticking out noticeably on my arm. In my dream, I was still right there on my bed and it was dark, but I could feel the bump as I outlined it with my index finger. Suddenly, the bump on my wrist moved up toward my arm, and the other one moved down toward my hand. I felt a sting on my hand as a dark drop of blood formed right before getting to my ring finger. I was holding back the urge to scratch as my heart sped up. I kept feeling that biting sensation on my arm. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't scream. I looked at my other arm and I saw three other bombs s parading up and down until I felt another sting near the inside of my elbow, another spot of dark blood. I wiggled my arms, trying to shake this burning feeling, until I finally scratched both of the spots vigorously with my fingernails. They were turning red and blood was filling up under my nails. Suddenly everything stopped. I looked down at my arm and there was long dark hair coming out from the bite area. Then it started moving. As the second hair came out, they moved to feel around the arm as I stared in disbelief. It was standing upright. They both seemed to be moving as if trying to feel around the arm as I stared in disbelief. But then a small head stuck out, and then the rest of the body of a dark cockroach started crawling over my skin. The other bombs kept moving. A second one came out, running out from under my skin and up my arm to my neck and straight to my ear, and it crawled inside. I tried to get up, and I turned my head and pulled on my ear, afraid of hearing the crunch of a dead roach inside of it. I recognized that sound, the scratches inside my ear, the muffled sounds of everything around me. I opened my eyes. Hannah was fast asleep. I reached my arm out to wake her up. She drowsily looked over to me as she leaned on her arm to sit up. I hear it, I hear it, she said, the scratching. Get the recorder, Hannah, wait, I said. She turned towards me. The dark little creature poked an antenna out of her ear, and then the second one. It crawled right out into her face. Right under her eye. Nana screamed. We both stood up, shaking our clothes and hair us two. Within three enormous roaches plopped right to the floor and crawled away. We lifted some of the loose floorboards and the closet. The entire area under the floorboards had been infested with roaches, and they later found hundreds more between the walls. I moved out for a couple of weeks while the owner took care of the problem. At least that was a plan, but I never went back. Scary Story podcast has written and produced by me Edwin Kovarubjas. These stories were originally published three years ago and suggested there were comments on YouTube and Spotify, so thank you for that. If you follow the show, I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.