Layers

[00:00:00] Hey there, it's Edwin. Scary Story Podcast will be getting to you earlier in the week starting next Tuesday. That'll be instead of Fridays from now on. And that's thanks to your feedback. For now, on with the story. Welcome to Scary Story Podcast.

[00:00:18] Here I'll tell you the story of a man who spent his best years at work and some of his experiences. My name is Edwin. And here's a scary story. I was leaning on my knuckles that were resting on top of the mop at the end of the hallway.

[00:00:39] It had been a long night, and it was time for me to go. It's strange being in a place that has seen me through pretty much everything, every phase of my life. You know, walking through the reception desk on my way to the custodian closet and passing

[00:00:56] by the mirror they have in the front, the one by the fake dusty flowers? I would look at myself and see that same kid, the one who wanted a few extra bucks to take his girlfriend out to dinner Friday nights. It was right after my senior year.

[00:01:13] Nancy was going to be a senior now, and back then we used to get married real young. It wasn't far off in my mind that one day I'd want to marry her. But I wasn't great at school, and life had not been fair with my parents either.

[00:01:28] They struggled all of their lives, and I remember telling myself that I wouldn't end up like them. I would be happy with just a stable job and a house with a backyard. One with real walls. One that couldn't be towed off the lot.

[00:01:47] One of the highways had just opened up, and the city was hard at work with the new side streets and such. Word going around the town at the time spoke about the new housing developments. The new stuff from New York and California.

[00:02:02] But like with all small towns, everyone had something to say. But I saw those places as my opportunity to finally get something nice. And so on my friend Ben's old truck, he would drive around at night and entering those large empty lots, screaming, This one, this one's mine!

[00:02:22] I miss that guy. It was about six months later when they started building the houses there, and along with that road came new ones. Just like they said. The one you could see off the reflection of the mirror at the front desk was Henderson Road.

[00:02:39] With new motels and fast food restaurants came along other jobs, and suddenly this place went from dirt roads and trailer parks to asphalt and lots of cars. And less trees. I don't know where I lost my town along the way, but it did give me several chances to

[00:02:57] do something. I borrowed an old suit from my dad, one that he would use for church and for flying sometimes, when I went to interview at Sammy's Motel. They were hiring for all positions, and I remember all I wanted to be was at the front

[00:03:14] desk in a suit and just greet people like they did in the movies. But they said that for two dollars an hour more, I could start working in maintenance.

[00:03:24] And that if I did good work, I would get a review at the end of the year and then be moved to be in charge of maintenance as a whole. I trusted the owners.

[00:03:34] They were friends of the family, and through all those years, they always did what they promised. And I really wish everything would have stayed the same. You know, they say that teachers remember all of their students as they go through their

[00:03:48] careers, but they never say that about any other people. I mean, I could tell you that I remember every single one of my guests. I mean, maybe not by name, but all of them were friendly and kind to me.

[00:04:02] Even the ones that came only to take care of business during their lunchtime or for brief moments after a night out. The things had been changing for a while. Mr. Jones eventually left the business to his son, Robert.

[00:04:17] He got a lot of his buddies to come and help with the business, adding new things that people do today like internet things, which worked for a bit, although everyone seemed to just get more stressed out. They wanted me to use a computer. Can you imagine that?

[00:04:34] To do cleaning and maintenance work? Just didn't make sense. I couldn't complain though. I didn't want to. It was their thing, and if I've learned anything throughout the years, it's to mind your own business.

[00:04:52] They soon started blaming me for a lot of the things they messed up on. Like, for example, they started doing a 24-hour check-in thing where people would come in by themselves and that opened a whole lot of trouble.

[00:05:08] Drugs and other things were around the hallway in the morning, and I don't even want to get into what happened in those rooms. They were terrible, even the non-smoking ones. But aside from the dirty carpets and toilets, there were other things that started happening at Sammy's Motel.

[00:05:25] The first one of many was with this woman named Teresa, from the state of Arizona. From what I heard, she didn't drive herself to Sammy's Motel, and I don't even think she stepped into the place over at room 114 on her own.

[00:05:45] It was about two years after Mr. Jones had left Robert in charge and the place was more or less still alright. The manager, a woman hired from out of town, was on the verge of quitting after all the demands Robert would put on everybody.

[00:06:00] And that night, when she was instructed once again to leave the place up to the cameras and security buttons to do their thing, she got in her car and went home after that long 12-hour shift. I mean, I would have done the same.

[00:06:15] That's what was supposed to happen. But that next morning, Robert and some of his friends who didn't actually work there had been coming in and out of the building, telling me and the cleaning staff about an incident that required us to be extra careful with everything.

[00:06:32] They shut the place down with the exception of seven or so guests that had not checked out that day, when they called that ambulance. That's what I call it, even though those who were in charge of it were definitely not there to keep someone alive.

[00:06:48] The police arrived, a couple of men in suits and cameras, and they asked each of us a few questions and that was that. Margaret, one of the cleaning ladies, had the toughest time getting all of the information out.

[00:07:03] She had been the one who made the discovery that morning. She stabbed into room 114. She found the woman's lifeless body in the bathtub. No note, no weapons. Just a cold person in a dry tub. I don't think I was able to process that back then.

[00:07:24] I was still very young and had my mind in other places. I had just gotten married and usually couldn't wait to get out of there to go back home to see Nancy after those long shifts. But I think it did hit the other employees pretty hard.

[00:07:41] All we knew of this woman was based on the check-in information. We all started calling her Teresa from Arizona. The police did their own investigation, but for all of our town's talk, Teresa from Arizona was enough. I remember going into room 114 to paint the walls.

[00:08:02] They looked perfectly fine to me, but Robert wanted them painted over to cover up the layers of bad stuff, as he put it. So that night I went over and painted it. I wiped down the tub and changed the light bulbs.

[00:08:17] I thought he would change things up and stop leaving that door open to let people check themselves in with whatever computer thing they were doing, but that didn't happen. It didn't take long for us to have a second incident. A bloodied room this time. Number 131.

[00:08:39] By that time, Margaret had quit and we had new people in, who were even more traumatized by the scene and with good reason. They had never been through that before. I didn't get to see it right away, but I was the one in charge of painting those walls

[00:08:56] after the poor job the cleanup crew would do. I remember going home and telling Nancy that everything went fine at work, except for one thing. She would normally find out what it was when it popped up on the news.

[00:09:11] By the time she found out about that one, I had already painted all the walls in that room. And it was always the same thing. Same patterns. Discovery, police questioning, then the newspaper and radio, and finally we would all forget about it.

[00:09:30] I'm happy for them for being able to do that because I never could. Those walls had streaks of brown liquid that had once been dark red. They'd stand out from the rest of the walls and if they wiped them for too long or were

[00:09:46] too rough with the paint, it would begin to peel, showing the layer underneath. I offered to help. I told him that I knew a guy who could sand the paint off for us or use paint remover to start over. The owners had given up.

[00:10:04] First it was the walls, then the ice machine. The carpets, then the beds. Curtains would get tiny holes that would cast little dots of light in the rooms at night. This somehow attracted a certain type of person to the Sammies Motel. Remember this was just a start.

[00:10:26] All of the employees were eventually replaced after the countless events at the motel. Not just deaths, but other strange things. I remember every single one of those co-workers, just like I remembered all of those who fell victim to the evil of the night.

[00:10:45] I would get asked often about the strange sounds and whispers that they'd hear at all hours of the day. And I would tell them, if you really want to know, I'll tell you. Think about it first. And every single one of them eventually decided to find out.

[00:11:10] Part 2 of Layers is coming up right after this. Stay with me. A common complaint from the employees, not the guests, was that the doors would get stuck. I mean, the guests knew what they were getting into after stepping into the reception desk area.

[00:11:32] But the employees, God bless them, still expected something better out of management. I would normally go in and sand off part of the door, the painted surface on the frame. It had been painted over so many times that it had grown thick enough to make the door

[00:11:49] barely fit on the frame itself, and got stuck. I would tell them about it, and they'd ask me why it had been painted over so many times. And I would just say that the owner wanted it that way, so I would do it.

[00:12:04] I would tell them that eventually they would find out for themselves. But the workers, especially the young ones, would be so interested in the dark part of all of this. You know, about the ghosts and all that stuff. I would tell them, leave them alone.

[00:12:23] They're not bothering anybody. They sure would push it. One time they showed up at night asking me to let them in to record ghosts or whatever. I had been working at night doing some of the plumbing repairs covering for someone else

[00:12:38] when they did that, and they came to me all freaked out saying that they had heard a woman whispering in one of their ears. That would happen to me as well. But it wasn't scary anymore.

[00:12:50] I knew about the calls to the front desk from room 114 even though it was empty. I wasn't the only one. It would ring in the middle of the night, sometimes when there was no attendant there,

[00:13:03] and I would have to walk all the way there only to see the room marked as available on the phone thing. I answered a couple of times, and just heard the sound of air. Obviously, those rooms were empty.

[00:13:18] I think you can be afraid of things when you don't know what they are. And I know about the rooms. I know who was in there, and I was there when they found Elizabeth, her body stuffed in the wooden box under the mattress.

[00:13:34] It was a complaint from a traveler going across the United States who checked out, saying that the smell of the room was terrible, even though he was very nice about it. When one of the maids moved the bed to clean underneath it, liquid was oozing onto the

[00:13:50] carpet and spreading a terrible smell all around the room and the hallway. When she knelt down to check it out, she got to see a greenish-purple arm about to fall to the floor, right through the wood boards from under the box spring.

[00:14:08] It used to be so easy back in the day, you see. Even with the technology that they had back then in the 90s, people wouldn't be so quick to pay with a credit card like they do now.

[00:14:21] I hear that they can trace your money down to the cent and figure out exactly where you had been. But not back then. The attendant would be happy to take your cash and your excuse for not having your ID card with you.

[00:14:37] It was better than having to get your card information and process everything by that evening, hoping that it would go through. And checks? Well, those were equally as bad to accept. I was glad to have taken a job in maintenance instead of the front desk.

[00:14:53] I don't know how I would have dealt with stuff like that. But in the end, it was the Bill Tinson family, the one that caused the owners to finally give up on the place for good.

[00:15:08] I got to meet them when I replaced their key after the father had lost it. Without going into the details of the incident, they were all found dead on a Saturday morning. They were forced to replace the carpet and furniture, and again, I was there to repaint

[00:15:24] the walls. It didn't happen all at once. I had been there for over 40 years already when they finally decided to sell it. And even though I don't know about other roadside motels, eight deaths over the span of 40 years doesn't seem as excessive as I make it sound.

[00:15:47] In the end, I was the only one left, quite literally, in the entire building. The new owners had removed the Sammy's Motel sign from up front, one that hadn't been changed for as long as I had been there.

[00:16:02] Along with that, they had the carpets torn off, all of the furniture thrown out of the back lot, with the lamps and everything. They were going to do a complete overhaul with the sinks, showers, and windows.

[00:16:16] I knew about every single nook and cranny of that place, so they asked me to stay with them while they sorted everything out. The tasks were only about replacing the parts of the pipes and wiring, and move them over

[00:16:32] to the place where they would reach their new installations. It was pretty easy near the end, although a little lonely. Some of my last days there were spent only with the light of my lamp, as I got rid of popcorn ceilings and scraped the paint off those doors.

[00:16:51] I would walk up and down those halls, past room 114 and 131, sometimes into 128 and, the saddest one, 140. And I would think so much about those people who came and went over the years. How they, I guess in part, helped me pay for that spot where I live.

[00:17:15] For that paycheck that would be vanishing, but had left me with savings for myself and my family for the next stage of my life. And it would be those whispers at night, while I would be in the rooms, that reminded me

[00:17:30] of those who stayed and probably didn't know it. The ones that would gently remind me of where we're going. I spent a little over a week scraping at those walls. I saved the sad rooms for last, revealing the lives once lived, be it through their

[00:17:49] blood or hair trapped there, or even just their breaths. And I thought that perhaps even parts of me were between those layers of paint. That was the one who had painted every single inch of those walls.

[00:18:06] What had been grown over the span of 40 years, was now being scraped away by its painter. I left the keys for the new owners in the lockbox outside and I then stood by the entrance door for a moment, looking at the dark empty front desk area.

[00:18:25] My eyes tried to make out the shapes I would see in the dark hallways for a bit. It was before I turned away and started heading toward my car. The fading sounds of the telephone was how it said goodbye to me.

[00:18:57] Do you want to know what I'm working on? You can follow me on social media. I'll leave links to everything in the description of this episode. Up next, check out Dark Memory, where I talk about real haunted places and mysteries.

[00:19:10] You can search for it by typing dark memory on your podcast app. Don't forget to tap follow so you get the next episode. Thank you very much for listening to my story. See you soon!