The Ghost Boy From the Park

Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. The stories in this episode deal with strangers that we encounter, people with their own set of stories that we would rather not learn about. My name is Edwin. Here it's a Scary Story. One by one, my friends started leaving once again. I looked over to my run down Honda Civic in the parking lot of the park, once again, making the rest of them think that I was about to leave too. They talked about their families and what they were going to have for dinner that night, and I heard my best friend complain about mac and cheese, one of my favorites is I was growing up until I was forced to eat it semi frozen from the home I used to live in. I was a bit older than them, and that's because I fell behind in school. Obviously. The cool part was that I was able to drive before anyone else, but I had to lie and tell them that it was my dad's car that I wasn't allowed to give rides. My uncle had given me that car well sort of left it for me when he died. I often wondered if he was the only one who cared, but I thanked them every single time I got into the car and drove it to Walmart. I would thank the Walmart security guard for the bottles of water he kept in his own car and gave them to me when I needed them the most. I would be thankful for the heads up from the woman who cleaned the parking lot for telling me when the store was about to open and I got to use the bathroom before customers started rolling in. The security guard would ask me about doing the security guard training, that he would help me pay for it, but there was still a week left before it started, and I'll tell you I could not wait for it. The job would pay enough to get me back into an apartment to be able to visit Walmart to buy food and socks instead of to sleep in its parking lot. So as I stood there, my shadow growing in front of me while I sat on top with that concrete picnic table at the park, I also saw the shadows of my friends that were stretching as they walked away down the sidewalk, laughing at each other over a joke that made to themselves. I could only look down on my torn down left shoe and wondered how life had gotten away from me like this, But still something inside always told me that there was a way out, and all I had to do was stick with it for just a little bit longer. Soon I would have a job and a paycheck, and I would be able to go see my little sister once again from the family that had taken her in. I could feel the tears swelling up behind my eyes with the slight pain of the pressure underneath them. When I heard the sound of grass moving in front of me, I looked up to see a speeding, dirty soccer ball rolling toward my bench. Slowed down right in front of the bench, part of the table, and stopped completely. I looked up at the empty field to my left, and then turned to me right. A tiny kid, he looked about four years old, standing on the shade of one of the tree trucks, away from the tree itself. He stood there, scared, looking at what this creepy dude would do to his ball. I got off the table and reached down for the ball and rolled it back toward him as best I could. But my aim had never been that great, and I missed by a few feet. All this time, he simply stood there, not even flinching, just looking at me. I yelled over to him that it's all right, or something like that, and he finally came out of his frozen state and walked toward me, completely ignoring the ball. Have you seen my dad, he asked me. I didn't know what to say. I think. I asked him what he looked like, and then asked if he needed to use my phone to call somebody. He was not four years old, he looked about seven. He started blankly at me and repeated his question, have you seen my dad? I looked right at him and didn't answer this time. Something was wrong with him. Where is your dad, he asked me. I told him that I didn't have one, And before I knew it, he was asking all the questions that a child might ask anybody, even strangers, very bluntly, very direct. No, I didn't know where he lived, and yes I have a younger sister. No, I don't have a mom, and yes I live by myself. That last question really got me thinking. Suddenly I heard the sound of the ball bouncing on the grass, and it stopped right in front of me once again, Were there too? I must have turned away for only a second before I looked back to where this little boy had been standing. With his arms by his side. This time, there was nobody there. I scanned the tree area with my eyes and I looked over to the fields and then looked behind me, then to where the car was parked, But the boy was nowhere to be found. I don't know who this little boy was. Part of me thinks that I imagined the whole thing. But when the security guard asked me how my day was once I got to the parking lot, and after seeing me out of it and trying to cheer me up, I told him that I had been sitting in the park for a while I saw a strange little boy there which just disappeared. I told him, Oh, no way, was he wearing shorts and a white shirt. Oh you've seen him, I asked him back. Not me personally, but I've heard so many stories about him. He likes to play around with the ball, from what I've heard. We talked about him for a while, and then we started talking about ghosts and such. It was another way to pass the time. Eventually I got my security guard training done and I was assigned to do a few shifts at that very park. I found it so strange that during my first tour of the location, the official one. The hiring manager told me about the reports of the ghost boy with a ball dating all the way back to the early eighties, So just ignore that I've never seen him or anything, so nothing to be afraid of, he said. I couldn't help to lose my smile. At that point, the manager looked right at me. What you don't believe in ghosts, do you? I found a picture the other day of me riding in the car with Mom, and unlike most of the stereotypes of things that parents used to do back then, my mom was different with me. Some of your friends might say that when they were growing up they never used seat belts, or that they remember riding in the back of a truck without a problem. But in this picture, Mom had me strapped in like a race car driver. I was smiling in an enormous car seat, and Mom was right next to me, proud of her creation. I guess I love looking at that photo. When I went off to college, her habit continued, with her calling me or sending me little reminders to make sure to lock my car doors and stuff like that, and I never found it annoying, mainly because I was so used to her being like that, I actually kind of missed her reminders when she passed away. That was a long time ago, and even though it still hurts to remember how much I miss her, I still think she's around. You see, we have an issue in her house, a different house not far from where I grew up. But my wife and her mother who lived with me, both know about this strange occurrence very well. You see. There's a few things that we have all noticed, but the main one is the issue we have with the doors. It started one night when I heard something fall in our bedroom while we were in the living room watching TV. It was like a picture frame had fallen down with a loud crash and had broken into a thousand pieces. My initial thought was that one of Mary's many crystal decorations had fallen from the wind from the open window. But then I remember that had closed it myself because Mary had trouble closing it. Well, the trouble was opening the thing because it would get stuck, just like we had trouble opening the door sometimes. Mary looked at me and jumped, grabbing my arm. She was thinking that someone had broken in, so she whispered that I please go check. She went to the kitchen and grabbed one of those roller things for making dough and pasta, and she looked almost comical, standing by the edge of the counter holding it with both hands. This neighborhood was safe, and at the time I had been there, we had never even witnessed a police incident in the area. Still, I walked down the hallway and toward the closed bedroom door. I reached for the doorknob, begging that it wouldn't get stuck this time. But I was not so lucky. The doorknob wouldn't turn. I tried to twist it as quietly as possible, but still the thing was stuck. I looked down the hall toward Mary, still standing in the kitchen looking at me. I rattled the doorknob a bit, trying to open it, but it was no use. This is what would happen, and it would happen often. This is the issue I had mentioned for the longest time. Doors would practically lock themselves. And these were regular doorknobs, without anything special about them, and the we got them to work was really strange. It would simply try it again a little later, and the doorknobs would turn smoothly. It had gotten to the point where we started adding doorstops to prevent our doors from shutting, but it wouldn't work on the bedroom doors because they would slip away on the wooden floorboards. It was annoying at first, but since it started such a long time ago, we had plenty of time to get used to it. I was about to walk away from the door when I heard shuffling inside the bedroom. There was someone in there. I wiggled the doorknob, shaking it for it to open, but it wouldn't work. I took a step back and then forward in order to try again, a trick that had worked I don't know how a thousand times before, but not this time. I heard the window inside the bedroom open and then shut, and still the dumb doorknob wouldn't twist. Looked over to my wife as she turned toward the window of the living room. Then a zooming shadow cast over her and the wall. Someone had run by the side of the house just at that instant. I reached for the doorknob once more, and it twisted it. I opened the door. The entire vanity mirror area had been tossed around. Someone had broken into the house while we were in there. Fortunately for us, the jewelry box that the thief took was full of buttons and needles, and the cookie tin can with my wife's rings and necklaces was still right where she had left it. To this day, we don't know what happened exactly, and we have talked about it multiple times. There was no way that the thief would have locked the door and unlocked it as they were leaving, because well, why would they do that? And I kept trying to open the door all that time. The only thing that my wife's mother says often is that my mom is likely still looking after me. With the reminders to lock the doors, she might have saved my life that day. Who knows, and so far it seems to be the best explanation. I used to have a co worker when I worked at a gas station one of the Arizona State Highways. It was a witness to the creepiest thing that has ever happened to me. She would always show up on time. It was generally a good worker and we got along great. We used to change our shifts often whenever she wanted to call out of work. We had a type of arrangement where I would take over her hours and she would take over mine without any issues. For fun, we would sometimes sit in front of the security cameras and make up stories about people who pumped gas in the front. All we had to do was the cleaning and attend to the rare customer paying with cash. It was generally safe, though I think that the worst this place got was around the time when people were talking about a strange creature that would lurk through the desert at night, that it would jump on the necks of unsuspecting victims, but mainly killed animals. And even though we never had to deal with getting robs or anything, we did have our share of encounters with creepy people that would come up to the gas station on foot and there was nothing else around for miles that would just hang out by the vending and ice machines that we had in the front. And that's kind of what the story's about. It was two in the morning and the manager had scheduled both of us at that time because of a concert that was going on in one of the nearby cities. We were expecting more traffic than usual. However, the concert was canceled and he never switched our schedules back, so we simply rolled with it. We both needed more hours that week and it was kind of working together, so we didn't say anything. We had both gotten some ice cream bars from the freezer and we're watching the security cameras when Michelle tapped my arm and pointed at one of the monitors. It was a man coming from the darkness of the road dragging his feet toward the gas station. Creepy, I remember saying, with not much else to say. This was a common thing, sort of, but he walked so slowly and we could both see him reaching for his back pocket to grab something. I immediately got paranoid, thinking that this would be the time that they rob us, and that I had even forgotten where the emergency button was and what we were supposed to do in such cases. Michelle told me to calm down in the best way she knew how, by shushing me loudly and then saying that it's okay. It was like our catchphrase once the trash can caught on fire, and that was her exact same reaction. Anyway, we both got closer to the screen as he stood by the edge of where the lights started under the roof above the gas pumps. He turned directly toward the camera and tilted his head. I think he knew we were looking at him. We were waiting on him to move, but he stood so still it looked like the camera had frozen. Suddenly, we heard a knock on the door. It would lock it at night. It only served customers through a little window by the cash register, but I nearly fell out of my chair when it happened. He both turned toward the sound at the same time, and they looked back at the screen, but the man was gone. Michelle was a brave one here, so she stood up and went around the counter to look at the door, but there was nobody there. We went back to the cameras, which gave us a view all around the building. Still you couldn't find anybody. Our manager went through the security camera recordings and saw the same thing, a man standing right by where the light of the gas station ended. But he said that the camera had frozen in only a certain section of the footage, which made no sense. He always tried to be a know it all, but I think this time he was just trying to keep us from being scared, because we might have quit right on the spot cars were still moving along the road during the supposedly frozen footage frames. We all knew it, but still we kept our mouths shut and accepted his explanation of just a weirdo walking around in the middle of the night. Still, I think it was something else