Three Empty Hooks and Other Haunting Tales

She screamed, it don't turn off the light. That it was full on freaking out from the outside of the boat, well on the boat, but on the outside part of the cabin. The light flickered back on, completely swallowed up by the dark sea all around us. Someone had clogged the toilet, and instead of fixing it, we collectively decided to use the bucket with the rope and then just slid it into the water, stuffing the toilet paper into the yellow plastic bag from the grocery store. I could still get some cell phone signal at that point, I remember that much. I looked at it while I was half asleep. Everything else was still debated by my own stubborn mind. I was trying hard to make me believe it never actually happened, that I'll wake up and see their dumb messages again on my phone. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. Eric's dad, the one who owned the boat, had told us that the toilet flush goes straight into the water. Who knows if that was real, but we took his word for it and figured it would be the same thing with the bucket. We just have to be more careful. I'd gotten sick almost immediately once we stepped on that thing the boat. I mean just two pills. I think I took the natural one first and then the chemical one because it wasn't working. I still felt the world twisting and flipping upside down every four seconds I was counting. Plus I couldn't ask my friends to leave the only room with the bed, no matter how tiny it was. When the three of them decided to go in there to hang out. It was the only normal place in the boat with furniture that wasn't made completely out of solid wood or rusted metal. But they were laughing and joking around as if everything was normal. The next thing, I remember that it came in talking about what a waste of space Richard was. Waste of space, she said, and I started laughing at that right away. Then she said that he had dropped the anchor, like literally dropped it, because the chain went all the way down. I knew it was serious then, but I still couldn't process what it meant. At the time, we were supposed to be out there for the evening. We had been joking about catching our own fish, because we brought sandwiches just in case no one caught anything, not that anyone actually tried. At least no one was going to have to wash the frying pans. But then it stormed out and kept yelling at Richard and Eric about god knows what. It all blurred together, mixing with the tiny waves bumping on the side of the boat, my name being shouted among them. I rolled out of bed and stepped out. All the lights were off. Don't turn off the light, I heard from the outside before the lights flickered on very I shouted toward the window. There were windows all around that tiny cabin of the boat, and yet I couldn't see her. I could tell something was off, though. Suddenly something startled me from the side window. Hands against the window, banging on it hard as they're trying to break the glass. We had worked on that thing together, all of us, Daddy, Richard, Eric, It was our summer project, and knew it's every corner except well, we didn't know how to fix it. It made it look nice, though, still. Something about hearing them hit the glass so hard made my blood boil. I yelled out what as it reached for the doorknob. Before I even touched it, it swung wide open. Slamming against the outer wall. The wind rushed in, but with it also came the darkness. I'm not sure if anyone else had ever seen anything darker than that, A door that opened to a deck against the wall of nothing, an emptiness with a texture so heavy that, if close enough, wouldn't let you breathe. I tried to stay away from it as I walked around the boat to the other side of the cabin, expecting to see everyone sitting on the deck at the back, maybe cans of soda in their hands, maybe the familiar songs of Maroon five through Richard's cheap old speaker, though when he bought at the swap meat the year before, a gift when he never gave away. Five steps in and there was nothing but the soft waves tinkling against the boat. The orange light bulbs we put in looked nice but did a terrible job against the darkness. Now I could see were dark lumps a few yards in front of me. I was about to shout out that is name when I heard the door slamming on the other side of the boat. I rushed over and watched as Steada was opening and slamming. The door shut over and over again. She stood completely still, looking at me with those wide brown eyes she would make when she would tell me one of her guys stories. They were large and un blinking. That what the hell? I yelled, walking over to her to grab the doorknob, But as it got closer, I realized that it wasn't there day. Looking back, her mouth was whiter, and her ears were large, her teeth yellowed and dark between them. Something about her hair reminded me of the pine needles we gathered on our gutters, the same ones that were piled outside that very bulu cabin in layers. They had been thick enough for an apossum to have made its home there, had its litter, and then come back to die. She had stopped slamming the door by this point and was looking right at me, her head beginning to drop down enough for me to lose her eyes. I took a step back, but she rushed at me with impossible speed. Her cold hands gripped my arms as she pushed me back toward the railing that I knew wouldn't hold us both. She was yelling something I couldn't decipher, an angry hiss coming from her entire body, anywhere but her own mouth. I grabbed her arm and twisted it, and then half of her body went over the railing, and then the rest of it. I heard no splashing, just a sudden PLoP into the water, and then silence, broken only by bubbles rising to the top. I held out her name and confusion, though I knew it wasn't her, I ran across the deck of the boat, yelling out for the guys, Richard and Eric, but there was no response. I walked around the boat, my breath now made up of soft screams as it looked for them and the emergency vests we had to buy for our registration, the last thing to pay aside from fuel before we could take it out to the water. There were three empty hooks but the only vest, and in a panic, I turned to my left and saw the dark lumps on the deck by the orange lights we had set up Eric Richard. I asked, half whispering by this point, but the lumps didn't move. I walked up to them cautiously, this time, afraid of them going after me the way that it did. But once I got up to them, I realized they were only the chairs they had taken out from the area inside the cabin. My heart was racing by this point. I turned around quickly to the railing that I had fallen off. I thought of throwing the vest overboard, of putting it on myself and jumping in there. Thought of everything but the fact that whoever I had seen there was not my friend. It couldn't have been. But I felt that small seedling of a doubt sprouting in my mind that I knew how to swim right. Why would she just sink down? Did I just not hear her? The boat was small compared to the ones we had run into earlier, not far from the surface of the water. That's when I thought of the boats. We hadn't been too far from the shoreline on purpose. We wanted to stay close so Eric could get back in time for something he needed to do at night. And yet ere we were floating in the dark waters, with no lights on the horizon or signs of nearby boats. And that's what got me worried. What if they had left me. I walked around the remaining part of the cabin and back to the door. I stepped inside and shut it behind me. I yelled out their names. I shouted hello. I pleaded with the emptiness on that boat that someone else would be there with me. And that's when, from the room I had just been in, I watched the figure of a guy move away back into that room. I hurried toward it. Loneliness was scarier right there. And then I swung open that door and found no one else, no other place to hide, no other place to leave that room, but that door. The confusion lasted just a couple of seconds before fear started crawling all over me. Nothing felt right there. The wall of darkness outside the boat, even the shapes of the chairs, the ones that were outside on the deck, it didn't seem to match. I sat on the floor, grabbing the sides of my head, wondering what could have possibly happened. That's when the voices started again, laughing and then shouting my name, being yelled through the glass, tapping on the windows non stop, over and over. I would hear those voices, and at times I could hear them say to open the door. The door in my mind was wide open. I heard that of repeating herself about Richard and the anchor time and time again, should call them a waste of space. I heard myself laughing. I could hear Eric yelling for Theddi. It was just all too much to bear, so I went outside again. I went to the bow of the boat. The anchor was missing. We had rigged one up on to the front side of it to crank from the front directly. It was the one that Thedda had been complaining about in tears. By this point, I went back inside and shut the door, begging my mind to stop circling around. So I closed my eyes and put my hands against my ears to hear nothing else. It was still dark out when I woke up. I stepped on that cold wooden floor. I hadn't brought a jacket. No one had. We weren't going to be out for that long. I felt that sickness to my stomach again, but no way I was going to take more medicine, and instead I just walked over to the door. Everything was still on the outside of the door. I saw the bright pink shoes at that it wore. Next to them were the two pairs of sandals we made fun of when Eric and Richard showed up with him. In the distance, and I'm saying, really far away, I could see the lines of tiny light. That was it. I rushed back inside to look for my phone, and fortunately I still had battery and signal. I looked through my messages, dozens of them, where are you, When are you guys coming back? And I kept scrolling looking for something about my friends, but there was nothing. I walked around the boat again, checking every area of it with my phone. I went to the bathroom, to the bottom part of the deck and looked under the chairs in case I missed something, each bringing further confirmation that I was alone. I went to the navigation chair, not sure if that thing had a name or not. I looked around for anything that looked off, but it didn't. I went back to the room, looked at the bags, the ones that belonged to them, and uneaten snacks by the table, searching through things to see if anything was out of place, but it wasn't. I called my mom at that moment. I told her where I was and what had happened. She was panicked over the whole thing, but I could tell she was relieved by the tone of her voice. She called back with another man in the line, some type of officer, coast guard or something. I gave him the information they needed about the location and boat or vessel. He called it, and about an hour later a light started shining in the distance. They came on board, asked if I needed medical help, and then asked about my friends, but I had no answers for them. They were able to bring the boat back to the dock, filed reports with the local authorities that his parents showed up first, followed by Eric and Richard's parents and some of their family, all of them asking what happened and where were they? We found out the next day when they washed up ashore on one of the nearby islands. A fisherman called in to report Eric first, and after a quick search they found there and Richard no signs of foul play, and after them hearing my account that I had been asleep while I heard the shouting on the motion sickness pills, they called it an accident. Richard had bruising on his hands and tore so consistent with getting tangled up with the anchor chain. They assumed Derek had jumped in after him after throwing the life vest. It was unlikely for Thedda to also jump in, they said so, despite her cause of death being drowning. The investigation remained inconclusive. But then there's a part I kept quiet, the thing that wasn't theda rushing at me part of me that believes something else was on that boat, And yet I have to stay with the story, the one of the pills for my own sanity. Up next, we have an old favorite. This one's called about a Ghost, and it's based on a request from Gabby, one of our loyal listeners, over on a comment that we received in one of our channels. I opened my eyes to the golden light of the sunset. Marissa chose the curtains, which I thought let too much light into the living room at one point, but I had grown to love. The light shining in my face. For an instant reminded me of the day we got married. I looked over to the table in the middle of the living room, across the couch and picked up the face down portrait of our wedding day. I put it back where it belonged, trying not to look at just how happy we used to be. Those rays of light highlighting the edges of her dark hair. It wasn't always like this, well, she had always been this way, Yeah, with the light and everything. She had always loved the sunny days, laughter, and places where there were crowds. You mentioned a crowded mall or a festival, she wanted to go. When we walked around and by pure coincidence we saw a group of people gathered around a street performer, or because something was being given away for free, I would let out an audible sigh. She would want to go. I was different, though. I like rainy days and sad stories. Sometimes not all the time, but there's something about cozying up around a fireplace and falling asleep to that instead of the late night comedy shows, the ones that Marissa loves to watch. She hated that about me. She was the biggest chicken in the world and could not manage to get through a simple horror movie, even a kid one. And when I convinced her to do so, she would make me walk with her everywhere, and sometimes in the middle of the night she would wake me up to walk with her and wait outside the bathroom for her. Yes, she was this afraid of things like that. I use it to my advantage when we got into arguments if I said something insensitive or forgot to take out the trash, and she'd be visibly upset and short with me. I would wait until nighttime. I would approach her and come in for a hug. If I saw her pull away slightly, I would simply mention something scary, a thing about a ghost. She'd immediately step closer to me and tell me to stop, which I would, but then she would stay close to me. Soon we would be speaking to each other as we normally would. Those were the days. We would laugh about it afterward. But I remember when I stopped joking around that way as much like the time we had been sitting on the couch and she found something on Instagram that she absolutely had to show me another cat video. I suspected, but no, she said, I absolutely had to watch it. It was a video of a cave where a small woman was seeing walking around in the dark, and then suddenly she got up close to the camera. The thing made me flinch. I'll admit that. She laughed, and I laughed too, scaring her by telling her that I would get her back. Now you won't, she said, sticking her tongue out. Do you want me to talk about the ghost? Huh? I asked, stop it? She yelled, half jokingly. I knew she was serious. Though. For a while we had been talking about some strange noises in the house. Even though I liked to joke about that a lot, I was a little scared of it, also, scared of those simple things. I made a face at her playing around like children on the couch. I missed those moments. We had ordered Chinese food and were eating in the living room couch when Marissa mentioned the light bulb that had gone out in the kitchen the night before. When suddenly, I swear we both heard something fall and shatter against the floor on the other side of the house. We were the only ones in there, so I grabbed the iron stick thing that we kept next to the fireplace. I sprinted off the couch and walked up toward the dining room area. I could see nothing there. I got feel Marissa against my back, her hands gripping my shirt. As I stepped closer to the kitchen counter, I saw it, a thousand pieces of glass of the light bulb, forming a tiny hilt of white dust against the floor. I looked back toward Marissa. Her eyes were opened wide. It's probably the ghost, I said, trying to ease some of the fear I was feeling, but the shiver that ran down my back gave it away. I was afraid too. I grabbed a dust pan in the hand room we had while Marissa stood behind me, holding her own hands against her chest. But what was it? She kept asking, how could that happen? I had no clue. Obviously, I didn't know what to do or what to tell her. More, things kept happening, mostly with things being misplaced. Part of me believed that this thing that was in our house had something to do with the arguments Marissa and I were having. I stayed out a little later than usual one day at work, less than an hour, but the sun had set and Marissa had made a big deal about it. I nearly yelled at her for the first time since we had met, but I held my anger back, simply throwing my jacket against a chair in the kitchen area as hard as I could. She was visibly scared and literally ran away from me, leaving the sturf for burning on the pan. I ran up to it and turned it off. The steam was turning to dark smoke when it placed the oversized lid on it. When the pan stopped crackling, I could hear Marissa sobbing in the bedroom. Our arguments were never like that, but now, whenever something came up, I would say or do something that would make it worse. Very unlike me, she would do the same things, bring up things that I had been doing forever and finding a fault with them. That was tired of it. She was tired of it, and it had been this way for months. Sometimes the only way to stay sane as a couple was to simply not talk to each other, or to limit our interactions. Not a great idea, I know. I walked up to the bedroom door that night and got to see her grabbing one of the blankets from the closet. I thought it was for me to sleep in the living room, something that I would do for the first time, but no, she walked right past me, ignoring me calling her name. I felt that anger once again, the sudden rush to push her away from me, to yell at her for being so emotional or unreasonable or dumb. So many words came across my mind as she disappeared into the hallway. Hate was not strong enough to describe my feelings toward her, But again I knew these were simply rushes of anger. They would go away in a few minutes. That night, I felt Marissa get back into bed and turned away from me sometime in the middle of the night. Then I felt her get up before dawn to get ready for work. I kept waking up, adjusting myself over and over, but still I refused to turn around to face her that anger. There was no way this would last another day. It never had, but that other day, when I woke up in the living room, Marissa still hadn't come back home. The sun had completely set by that time. While I was sitting there in the dark, not wanting to or unable to turn on the lights to the living room, I must have been dozing off when I heard the keys against a doorknob. Marissa was picking off her jacket when she peeked into the living room to see me. She ignored my hello as she walked over to the kitchen to drop off some leftovers from wherever she had dined. She walked over to the living room, my mind went dark with fury. I wanted to scream and destroy the useless curtains she had decided on for the living room. I wanted to shred them to pieces and then move on to the disgusting green chair she picked for the living room. Then I wanted to pay her a visit. Hold back, I told myself. I took a few deep breaths. This was going to go away, and it did. That night, Marissa grabbed the blanket and walked over to the living room once again without saying a word, and again I held back saying what I was thinking. As she settled into the couch and I could see her knowing phone screens still on, I knew that I wouldn't be able to sleep well once again, and it was going to be her fault. Sure enough, at around two in the morning, I felt her next to me on the bed, too much for her. I figured I really didn't want to look at her face, and that came as a courtesy from those pointless curtains that let all of the light from the street lamps outside in. But I needed to use a bathroom. I crawled out of the bed, not even minding making too much noise, not caring if she woke up. I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway when something caught my eye. It was a light floating in the living room. I rubbed my eyes and I felt them adjust to the darkness. It couldn't be happening. I stepped closer to it, but it flickered off. That's when I saw it, a dark lump resting on the couch. I thought of the ghost, the silhouettes. I would see the thing that made random noises and move things around, and intruder or some type of haunt. My face went cold and my chest ran out of air. My socks nearly made me slip on the wooden floor. As I ran back to my room to grab my phone, I turned on the lights of the hallway and then the bedrooms. As I stepped inside, I looked over Marissa on the bed. There was nobody there, Marissa, I yelled out what I heard a voice say from the living room. I could hear Marissa moving around over there as she asked what is it? With fear in her voice. I saw the light of the living room turn on as she crawled out of the dark blue blanket, moving her hair away from her face. I stood there, frozen. I turned my head back toward the bedroom, now with the orange lights of the lamp on. What is it? She asked again, worried and about to cry. This time, I walked toward her with the urge to give her a hug. Everything would be all right. I was hugging her tightly on that couch when you both heard it, the voice from the bedroom, the whispering chance of someone or something taunting us. We would get through this, I told her. She looked at me through the tears in her eyes. She nodded and placed her head carefully against my shoulder once again. Our final feature is a remaster of There's an Old Lady Who Visits My Dreams. I started writing down my dreams after looking one up in a book that would tell you the meanings behind them. I remember that I met an old lady who would come up to me. She would open up her coin purse and give me a dollar. Sometimes it would be in quarters, sometimes it would be a dollar bill, but I remember counting it. It was always exactly one dollar. What happened so often that I started looking up the meaning of coins, the meaning of money, and the meaning of old people in my dreams. The mentioned positivity and wisdom, but it surely didn't feel like that. That old lady had no eyes and no teeth, and her purple hand and black veins would be as cold as ice when she would place the money in my hand and close it for me into a fist. That feeling still gives me the creeps. When I told my friend about it, she said that I should start writing these down, to which I replied that would be of no use since I would just forget most of the dreams right away. She convinced me to try anyway, so I grabbed the cheap paper notebook and put it next to my bed. I remember that night I fell asleep listening to my window fan. I woke up suddenly with the noise of cars and honking still in my head, for my dreams slowly fading away. That's when I wrote down the following entry. My taxi driver dropped me off to pick up some flower to take for his dead brother. I couldn't say no to the pit stop, even though I was in a hurry. He gave me a twenty dollars bill and asked me to pick them up from the flower shop. There was no parking, and then the woman gave me the change one dollar. I got to my apartment and he left for the cemetery. Now who knew that I could remember these things. It's like a whole other world that makes no sense. The second morning, I wrote down another entry. I'm sitting waiting for my mom at the laundromat, playing with a toy gun that shoots rubber bands. It broke and I was trying to fix it. The old lady comes by and says, well, aren't you a good boy? She gives me a dollar, she closes my hand. Another woman comes in yelling frantically. Her baby had been taken from her car and she was panicking. And so I kept writing every morning, sometimes in the dark, writing as fast as possible before forgetting what the dream was. And yes, the old lady would always be there. After about a month, I noticed that the dreams had recurring characters. Sometimes a woman yelling for her baby would run into me as I was leaving for work, or the same taxi driver would pick me up from a meeting. Sometimes I would enter the same flower shop, but in the city I didn't recognize. Even in some of the weirder dreams with impossible scenarios, or with my parents driving me somewhere as a child, I would notice the same place. My entries became more detailed, sometimes two or three pages long, and I got into the habit of recording them on my cell phone and then passing them onto paper right away. I became obsessed, and these dreams are trying to tell me something of this place I didn't know. My friends suggested that I stop writing, But now whenever I see a yellow cab, I look for the driver's face to see if I recognize them. But I know I can't stop writing. The unknown city in my dreams is familiar now. I know the names of the streets. I see the same delivery man and the same old lady over and over again. I'm afraid that I've created a different world for myself when I sleep living in someone else's life. Where is this place? Who are these people? And what do they want? Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kohar Rubiaz. If you have any old favorite stories that you want me to remake, please let me know. I'm working on bringing back my old, familiar style to the stories, both authentic to my style and to what everyone else enjoys. You've been listening for a while, you know I really like dark, melancholic and realistic stories about things that could happen instead of the typical monsters and evil creatures, but I'm always up for experimenting with those. If that's something you want to hear, but anyway, let me know in the comments or via email at Edwin at scarystory dot com. I rarely get to hear from everyone, so any signs of life would really help. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.