The Lady on the Porch

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. There is a woman who sits on her porch. Her stare can be felt several houses down, but she doesn't speak, and all we can do is come up with stories of what she's done and who she might actually be. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. My assistant called me this morning asking about sending a card or flowers, and my stomach dropped a little less this time, but I still felt that rush of dread and the wish for time to hurry up and get me past this feeling, wishing for nightfall, just for everything to go by faster again. I was the last one of the group left alive now, and I knew it was coming. I knew it was my fault. We were five investors, we called ourselves. We were a group of losers to the rest of the world, the ones who had an idea to make a movie after hearing how Welder had gone to another group from the film school we all dropped out of They had no idea what they were doing, and yet they all ended up with their own homes paid off. Two of them got married, and the other ended up traveling around the world from what he sold to Fillmart Inc. One of the biggest buyers and producers. They took parts of our ideas we presented. Some were blatantly stolen and others were more well hidden, and yet no one was going to go get them in trouble. I still remember Matt's call. I can hear his voice ringing in my ear, yelling that the group had just sold for sixteen million dollars, yelling at the top of his lungs with curse words left and right, calling them names, calling them lucky at times, and criticizing the film that they had just launched at the festival and its buyer. Isn't it our idea? Man? Didn't we come up with the same thing? Was still used three way calling back then, and he got another call from Jacob at the same time. When he got on the call, nobody understood anything. The ringing in my ear made me turn my head away from the speaker for a bit. Imagine setting off a firecracker and a firework booth and then hearing everything pop. That's what this call was like. Once they call him down, Matt got off the call to answer another one. I'm assuming it was Jeane. She had actually seen the premiere and texted us to now infamous, You're not gonna like this message. Their movie had a simple premise. A man falls in love with a married woman. They talk about their troubles and connect over their conversations. Nobody leaves anybody, she never cheats, and he eventually moves on after heartbreak. But it was the way it was framed that made it troubling. It was in reverse that was our idea. We should have kept our mouth shut still. We had nothing else to do with it. The film had already sold. It was a once in a lifetime kind of thing for our school. It was not well known anyway, and everyone had lost all hope there. That's kind of what we left. But I guess their hopes ended up just becoming production assistant somewhere, or making commercials locally, maybe for the rich nonprofits in the area. Even though none of it mattered, we still try to change our fate. We had nothing to lose at this point. All we needed was a story, a good one to make a movie about it, and we found one. I was helping my dad out with the lawnmower one day when he told me about the woman who lived on the street. The one who needed help with her lawn. She had gotten a notification from the city about it. She was a staple in the neighborhood, sort of. She was strapped to her porch. Nobody ever saw her sit there, like actually moved to the chair and sit, and nobody would see her go back into her house. I laughed and asked how she was still alive. It seemed like she had been old my whole life. He tried to hold back his laughter before letting some of it out. He told me to shut up and help him drag the stuff over to her yard, that it would only take about an hour. I saw her eyes light up when she saw us come over, or at least I thought I did. Good afternoon, ma'am, I said, my voice shaky as I remembered being scared of her when I was a kid. I stared at her lips. I revealed a few yellow teeth that I tried not to look at. We got to work. Dad left around ten minutes later to grab a trash can, and then came back when I was almost done. The whole time, I kept thinking about what had just happened with the movie idea and if we were really going to go with the story of a virus, one that invested a small town, turning them into aggressive cannibals. Basically a zombie movie meets the Hills Have Eyes kind of thing. But around the time you were planning to have something out, it would be prime season for horror. I talked to myself out loud. With that machine rumbling in front of me, the old lady wouldn't be able to hear me either. Everything from vampires to witches and goblins, to post apocalyptic religious movies. Bakaa, another Dracula, another Blair Witch, another book of Eli. Come on, now, why can't we come up with something new around here? Go with the typical haunted house story? Is that really the limit of our minds? At that very moment, I looked up at Missus beneath this on the porch that was her name. I could swear I saw her eyes turn completely black for an instant, though maybe it was just my imagination and coming to life. Right then, I had just asked for an idea, and I heard distant yelling among all the noise, and then a cloud of dirt blew up in front of me. I had hit a small heap of dirt and my dad was out there yelling for me to watch out for it. The lawnmower turned off as my dad walked up to me. She'll be fine, he said. I looked up at missus beneath this, smiling through the cloud of dirt I had just made in her front yard, completely unbothered. She looked at me as my dad and I both coughed with the necks of our shirts over our noses. He didn't seem to notice her anymore. I started up the lawnmower and finished up the front yard. Dad took the back part of the house while I picked everything up and trimmed the edges of the yellowed grass against the concrete. I could feel the old Lady's eyes on my neck the whole time, and I remembered why I had been afraid of her for so long. I started as a joke rumors around school that talked about the old Lady. We used to sing it in a chant to scare the girls in our class, sometimes humming it to the bathrooms or in the quiet hallways. Some kids would actually cry, the old lady who sits on the porch, always alone, always alone. We thought it rhymed, but it didn't she ate her son, She ate her daughter, and now is alone, Now is alone. She looks at you, she curses you. Now you're alone. Now you're alone. And I had it the idea for a movie. April loved it. Her cousins had been staying with her, coming all the way from Los Angeles. She said, as if that automatically made them great actors. You could at least participate. We had or could borrow equipment that could get us by some like Matt going into debt with some of the gear he got at a discount when Jimmy's Camera was going out of business, a poor guy with an eight thousand dollars camera that he was afraid to use. But everyone was in. Our script actually started to come together that same night over the phone before we met up at Becky's, a signer that always had the same customers. All we had to do was put it together. It was going to be about a woman who watches a town, knowing that every secret and movements of people. She knows that the married couples who cheat, and the teens that knocked over the mailboxes. She's quiet, always still, and always watching. She holds a secret. Let's make her live at the end of a cul de sac for better views. We had to give her a name, of course, but we decided to keep it between us. Women on the porch. No missus Beckert, just the made up name. No the lady on the porch. That might work if you change just here and there. And we had it. The woman who cursed an entire town. Lady on the porch. Now I should have known. I really should have known we were getting into When all of it came together, I knew everything seemed way too easy. Even the filming. We had four main actors in the whole movie that took us two months to finish a record. They asked for very little money, perfect stuff that we all put together with some loan sharks a credit cards quite easily. It was gonna work. But once a post production started and we were gonna edit, we had already sunk about forty thousand dollars into the whole thing, almost completely. Even among the five of us. It didn't even notice how we were spending it. It was quick and like I said, easy, it was until we were finished and doing the final Edits the point when you know the whole story and then you know what's going to happen enough to regret even starting it, because now it makes no sense, and you think others are going to notice that you don't know what you're doing, but it was too late by then. It always is. All you have to do is get everything together at just the color, the sound, to a couple more revisions with whoever did the last edit, and keep it going. We ignore the details at some point, hoping that the story by itself is able to carry the entire movie for you. We submitted it to festivals, to screenings. We signed up at the local colleges for a premier display of an indie movie that they had. It was great, People loved it. The movie started with a woman frail and about to topple over as she got up from the bed. She was reaching for a comb and boiling water to put over a coffee stained cup. The floor creaks under her as she makes her way to the kitchen table, then to the living room. She finally opens the front door, and it's dark outside, and she takes four more steps. She sits down on the porch facing an empty street. The sun rises and the street comes to live, and though we don't see her eyes just yet. The entire movie moves along as it explores her past and flashbacks, explaining why she ended up alone, combining what she's seeing across the street with the neighbors to her own experiences. But you know, the whole time that we're telling the stories, I couldn't help I remember how easy everything came together. We all knew the story of our town and the things we told each other as children, about the woman from the porch, how her husband left her, how her children disappeared, how it was set around the neighborhood, that she practiced your could through rituals, and that she was doomed to remain awake at all times. A couple of us got to see her during the filming of the movie, and we felt such guilt. When we were recording in an area nearby, she looked at us as if we were doing her a disservice, like her story wasn't accurate enough. I almost felt sorry for her instead of afraid. Eventually, her stairs down the street became angrier. She knew what we were doing, walking in and out of the houses with gear, the ones we stored at my parents place. She wanted to tell us something. The movie was done, and many found the story of the old lady from the porch. They connected it to Missus beneath this from the block right away, the woman who was always there looking at the street. They started taking pictures of her, not many at first, but then a few kids from the crowd from the Platter Indie Movie Festival try to get an interview with her. They freaked out halfway through when they noticed that she didn't speak. She just smiled with those few yellow teeth and empty expression. They managed to publish these pictures on Facebook, where the post was picked up by a local newspaper and then a national one. Our movie started becoming famous for that reason alone. They got optioned by a large production company for a remaster, and a deal for a second part came through. It got placed in theaters, and we went to signings. A book was going to come out of everything, and before we knew it, we're making real money. Thousands and then tens of thousands and more, sometimes in a single day of sales. Everything came to us very fast, merchandising agents, appearances and TV shows and interviews with newspapers, and all this time people were gathering and looking at Missus beneath this from the front of her yard. They were waving at her the same way that kids look at a tiger at a zoo admiration, with a mix of fear, while all she did was smile and looked their way with her empty eyes. The old lady who sits on the porch, always alone, always alone. She ate her son and daughter, and now he's alone, Now he's alone. She looks at you, she curses you, and now you're alone, Now you're alone. The story of the disappearances of her children and husband also became well known, and not for investigators to pick it back up. The police showed up at her house a couple of times, and all the neighbors came out, thinking that she had died, but no, they were simply walking past her and into the place. They must surely know how she manages to take care of herself, although from what I found, she did have a caretaker that would come once a day to check up on her. Some say that she was a distant family member, while others said that it was a nerse hired by her because she had a lot of money stored in a bank account. They did find a couple of things on the story of her children, and yes it was deemed suspicious, but not enough to charge her. The rooms had remained intact for years, even with hair on her daughter's comb somewhat fifty years later or more, no records of her disappearance, and no way to get it out of her from someone who wouldn't speak on the whereabouts. I thought about her a lot, and even though I brought it up to April and Jean a couple of times that I felt uneasy, like we had taken advantage of Missus beneath This to make a movie out of her and the rumors we used to hear as kids. We're all feeling the same level of discomfort with the whole thing, considering how badly we made her look. But it turned out to be kind of justified. There was a woman we meant while we were poking around to get some information on Missus beneath This. Her name was ce Celia. The woman who gave us more information, and of course it made us even more excited about the whole story when she told us that Missus Beneatha's had been known to perform rituals in her home, that she had been cursed by one of them. She said that she had heard the rumors too, but that she had noticed other things about Missus Beneatha's something that made her seriously think that maybe she wasn't even alive anymore, that all we were saying was what remained of her. Her hairstyle is always the same. Don't you notice that she stood up to look at herself in the mirror. No matter how hard I try, I always have to take care of this mop, she joked as she grabbed her hair and patted it twice on the signs and one time on top. April and I looked at each other, didn't say anything. Missus Beneatha's was a she wasn't there at night, was she? No, she wasn't at night, I mean, and she was alive. You would see her turned her head every once in a while, and the caretaker would clean her up from time to time. There was something off about her. I don't know how bad I would get until the first one of us died. It was Jeanne. She was found in her car and some of her last calls had been to Jacob. All this time we had been talking about how uneasy we felt the nightmares of this woman at first, we thought it was all because of what we were filming. Some of those scenes were pretty dark, especially the rituals done with historical accuracy and everything. Jean's friend, who played the role of Missus beneath this, looked exactly like her. We had a scene where she buries one of her children, done in the rain that really stuck with me for days after filming, and every single one of us, Matt, Jacob, Jean and April we knew exactly what we wanted and corrected the camera guy, the actors, the lighting right there on the spot, as if we were just retelling something from memory. She picks up the body in silence, slowed down as we're walking, All these little details, And how did we know? We thought it was just because we knew the story. We kept telling ourselves that we understood it deeply because of what we learned growing up. But did we really that chance was all we had? The rumors we heard in the hallways twenty years prior, I should have known. Did she want us to tell her story and found my vulnerability through anger? Did she get her story told through us? It was a theory that Jean had. She dreamt of her and saw her in odd places. During one of our signings, she had to walk away because of an anxiety, claiming to have seen her staring at her right in front of her holding a book. When she shut her eyes, Missus Beneathas was gone. She started hearing sounds moaning of pain and solitude, especially at night. We told her to keep it together, but we all knew by that point that this was no coincidence. Jacob admitted it first. He had seen her at night peeking through his window. This old lady, imagine that, and thinking that he was just tired from the whole movie or deal, he didn't look into it. But then the nightmare started. Missus beneathe Is rocking in a chair right by his bed. Over the course of a week, we started getting his phone calls in the middle of the night with theory after theory about Missus Beneathas and how to get her to talk. By this point, she was gone. After Jeane was found dead in her car, Missus Beneatha's was sent away to a nursing home, where so everyone claimed, she was being bothered by curious people trying to see the main subject of a very famous movie we had made. And then Jacob's calls stopped coming. One night, he called his brother to check up on him. My nightmare came to life. He was found dead by his own doing. It was the same cause of death as Jeanne, April and Matt were freaking out, talking about how far we had taken the whole thing, that none of it mattered, not the money, not the fame. What had we done? We did our best to forget about it. A couple of years later, April passed away tragically in a car accident, and then a year after that is when I got the news that Matt had passed away while on a business trip. Found in a hotel room. I was the last one now, and every time I got a call for an interview, I would yell at the agent no more of this. I could hear steps in the middle of the night, dragging along the floor. Missus Beneatha's eyes stared at me from the ceiling. When I woke up. She followed me in my dreams, and every scene of that movie made me wonder how we were capable of making such a thing a truly original film, or what I thought it had been might have not been entirely hours to begin with some one had seen a group of desperate fools and used us to tell her story. And now, when I sit in the dark, I think I see her sitting at the edge of my bed. I smell her rotting breath, I see her yellow teeth glowing in the night, that empty stare, And I know it's my turn, and I don't know when I'll go, but I want it desperately to be my choice. This time. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kobar Rujaz the special thanks to everyone who dropped comments with ideas for stories. If you want to hear more, we have a new show called Paranormal Club available on this app as well. We read listeners submissions talk about paranormal events and some pretty dark history too. Just search for Paranormal Club and you'll find me. Also a huge shout out to our Scary Plus members who get to listen ad free. Thank you so much for your support. You're following the show. I will bring another story next week. Thank you very much for listening, But Scary everyone, see you soon.