Stories

I live by myself in an old house. It was the cheapest thing I could afford after my divorce. The roof leaks in the living room area whenever it rains, and the bathroom lets out an old sewer smell every once in a while when the toilet bubbles. Other than that, it’s been fine.

Less than a month after moving in, the new neighbor at the time invited me to a barbecue at his house, and the whole family seemed nice. They kept asking me about my house and what I thought about it. I told them about the issues, but they seemed very interested in that house. When I asked them if they’ve ever been inside, the neighbor and his wife were more than interested in the offer they assumed I was making, and pretty much invited themselves to go check it out right then and there.

I was definitely not ready to have visitors over. I’m a messy person by nature, and I had old Chinese food take out boxes and empty ketchup packets all over my couch. I didn’t even have a coffee table or a television yet. Too late to tell them, I guess.

They stepped in and walked around, looking at the corner of the ceiling and the wall, a particular spot that had some stains running down the wall that I never bothered to clean since I moved in.

The neighbor’s wife was entering the hallway as her husband and I awkwardly stood in the living room without much to say. Suddenly she screamed and fell to the ground, desperately trying to crawl toward us, but something was pulling her back. Her husband ran toward her, helped her up, and yelled at me to help with her missing shoe a few steps down the hall.

I didn’t know what to say. I went out to the front porch to see what was happening. I never found her shoe.

The woman had already ran back to her house, and the neighbor was making his way to his house too. I decided not to go back to the barbecue, but I also didn’t want to go back inside.

It was around 11pm when my cell phone’s battery started dying and I decided to go back inside, when I heard the voice of someone calling out my name. It was another neighbor, from two houses down.

He told me that pretty much everyone knew of what had happened, and he felt it was right to give me an explanation. The whole neighborhood was aware of the house’s story already. The house had seen many new owners come in and leave. Mainly young couples.

As it turns out, the house was the home of several gruesome events back in the 70s, where a man murdered two women and hid their bodies in the attic for weeks before the smell of the corpses brought the attention of the neighbors. He too was divorced. Good man.

He was getting ready to kill his next victim, but she managed to escape and tell the police. He ran away, but was later found dead, floating in a lake. Nobody knows how he ended in there.

The story didn’t scare me for some reason, and I could tell that the neighbor felt uncomfortable at my nonexistent reaction to the story.

Oh well. I feel at home.

I rarely leave this house now. I don’t think I can leave. I don’t want to. I feel like a different person when I’m here.

It has been almost a year since the neighbor’s barbecue. He never invited me again. It’s that woman’s fault. I have an undeniable hate toward her. I don’t like seeing her when she gets home from work, I don’t like her hair, her face, or the tapping her heels make when she walks up her steps and onto her porch.

I don’t like to see her breathing.

It has been several times when I wake up and see a figure moving away from my bed in the shadows. It happens at least once a week since I moved into this place. It seemed nice on the inside, something designed by an interior decorator, even though the outside is old and musky.

I wasn’t expecting to like the new apartment, since it is in a neighborhood full of retirees and people who have nothing better to do than to sit in front of their porches and pick food out of their teeth, but its warm and has everything I need.

I’m on a work assignment for three months. I paid for those three months upfront, since the owner offered me a deal, though she told me that cleaning services were included, but they haven’t showed up yet.

I know about the missing cleaners because something strange happened to me, the very first memorable moment about this place. I had just gotten back from work and when I heard someone moving things around in my room. I saw a stuffed teddy bear right outside the hall and a small heap of dirt, gum wrappers, and other small pieces of trash right by the door.

I figured the cleaning people had gotten there before me and let themselves in, but when I got to the room to say hello, nobody was there. I called the owner’s cell phone and left a message about the cleaners, but she called me back to say that they weren’t going to be able to clean up my place, but that I would be reimbursed. It was odd.

Still confused, I picked up the black bear and put it on my kitchen counter. It was an old raggedy thing, I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to throw it out, but figured that it might belong to someone, to one of the owners perhaps, and just kind of set it in plain sight.

That night I heard noises in the kitchen late into the night, like something metallic falling from the counters, like forks or knives. I turned on my lights and went straight for the kitchen. Nothing was on the floor, nothing seemed out of place.

Creeped out, I went back to my room and sat on my bed for a while.

That’s the night when the moving shadow started showing up. At first, it must have been a dream, since I clearly saw somebody, a little girl, floating away from the foot of my bed and toward the bedroom door. I had been woken up by the cries of a cat when I saw the figure. Oh, how I hate cats. They sound like real babies when they cry.

Every week or so after that, I wake up due to a random tap or knock, and my eyes adjust in the dark to catch the dark figure moving away from me, from my side of the bed.

It’s only recently, last week actually, that I got a clear view of what the figure is. It’s a little girl, and she stands there, with a creepy smile, way too big for her face, leaning slowly toward me. One night, trying not to act too scared, hoping she would go away, I rolled over to the side, toward the window and shut my eyes.

Curiosity got the best of me and slowly, I opened them again. And there she was, as if she knew to wait for me. Her pale skin and purple lips in the shape of a broad smile, her dark pupils staring right at me. I could smell her now, the stench was that of rotting meat.

I rolled over to the other side and off the bed, and reached for the light switch. I turned around. She was gone.

I told my coworkers the story, and even though most laughed at first, two days ago every single one of them that I told mentioned that they too started seeing the little girl with the creepy smile. That she just stares. All of the descriptions match.

The coworker that I hang out with the most believes it to be the hidden girl of the objects, which is a legend among the old folk in town. She can make objects appear before showing up herself. They say that she warns you, sometimes with whispers and sometimes with knocks. She wakes you up over a period of weeks before appearing. He sent me a link to a blog post about it, it was published back in 2002, where the author writes in detail every single time the little girl appeared while she slept. She even had a hand drawn image of… it.

The thing is, I had read about this before, from some random Japanese forum I visit sometimes, except she was called the teeth girl, I figured they must have done a poor job translating the story when I read it. It wasn’t very interesting. But this new post shared something else. It came with a warning. On the site, it says: “Share with the affected only.”

With the affected? Only? My coworker told me about a theory that he has, that the story is the trigger. The story brings her to life again. He told me that whoever hears about her will let her keep on living. But I don’t believe in that.

But it’s night time now, and I’m getting ready for bed. She might show up again tonight. Maybe at the foot of my bed… maybe at the foot of…

My classmates finally asked me where I work. I think they were all wondering this because my pants are always dirty, or because sometimes I come in sweaty to class, or because I come in with random things to hold my hair into a messy ponytail.

I work down the street, actually. There’s a cemetery there.

My job is to dig, sometimes by hand with a shovel, and sometimes with the machines. The job is simple, we get the spot location and dig either a standard-sized grave, an infant plot, or an extra large or double one. The dirt is always soft and black, and I’ve lost some weight since I started digging. It’s actually kind of a good workout.

I’ve never been there for an actual burial, but I have been there with the grieving relatives who sneak in there late into the night, sometimes while I’m digging. We have a team of two or three people, and we get these loud bright generator-powered lights to work when it gets dark. Most of the time, however, I had to be there early in the morning, before dawn.

One night, a coworker warned me about an older man who was sitting by a tree and had been there all night. Apparently his wife had just died. He was asked to leave but he refused. They said he didn’t seem dangerous, but to keep my phone on me in case I needed something. The security guard house was located at the entrance and they did their rounds every two hours or so. I know they skipped out on a few, but there were never any major issues.

Plot in section P4.

Another late night.

I dragged the generator to the foot of the hill, started it up, and got to work. That first instance when your shovel hits the ground was always the hardest. It meant that I still had a long ways to go. Then I needed to start up one more before I could call it a night. It’s best not to think about that sometimes.

I was halfway done when I happened to look up toward the tree on the left side of the hill, and sure enough, I could see a figure of a man sitting down, a hat covering his face.

I kept digging, but after a few minutes, I looked to the left again to look at the tree. I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t sneak up behind me, I don’t know. Call it paranoia, but us humans can have evil intentions at times. The dead are dead, they don’t bother me.

I finished up, looked at my post-it for the next plot, section P9, number 7. Just up the path, thankfully. It was close enough for me to not have to move the lights, but just rotate them a little to the left.

I didn’t bring my Bluetooth speakers this time, and even though my phone was on full blast, the empty field of the dead seemed to muffle my music. We weren’t allowed to wear earphones. I looked up and with the light now shining toward the tree, I got a clearer view of the man. The light didn’t seem bother him, neither did my music apparently.

I turned my back to the tree and started digging, but I didn’t feel comfortable that way, so I turned to the other side. I didn’t feel comfortable that way either, looking toward the tree and the man.

While standing there, deciding what to do, I felt someone tap my shoulder. I turned around.

Nobody was there.

I looked toward the tree, but the man was still there.

I felt another tap. It was rougher this time. It hurt a little bit.

I quickly turned around again, but no one was there.

I picked up my phone and called the security booth.

“Yes? What’s up?”

“Something weird is happening.”

“What? A ghost?” they replied, jokingly. I didn’t find it funny at all. Since I didn’t respond, they said, “I’ll be right over, where are you?”

I told him, and hung up. I put my shovel down and started walking toward the light setup a little ways down the path. Two steps in and I felt someone pulling on my hair. I screamed.

I tried to turn around and punch and kick at whatever was behind me, desperately trying to get away, but there was nothing there. I started running, cold sweat dripping down my forehead and my hair, now undone, sticking to my neck. I went past the lights and down the path, hoping to find the guard along the way.

I made it all the way to the security booth, but the guard’s golf cart was gone. The door was locked. I was planning on running all the way out into the parking lot, wondering how I would explain myself, when I saw the small headlights of the security guard approaching. I could hear him talking loudly on his phone. He was on with the local police.

It turns out that he went around the hill toward where I told him I was, but couldn’t find me. He got off his cart to ask the man by the tree if he had seen me, but the man didn’t respond. He got closer, repeating his question even louder, but the man wouldn’t budge.

In a last attempt, the guard tapped the man on the shoulder and the man toppled over. He was dead. He was dead the whole time.

—

I didn’t think much of the events of that night until I walked up to the tree with one of my coworkers a few days later. Maybe because I hadn’t gone there because I didn’t want to freak myself out. They couldn’t believe it, and we walked up to check out the scene as I told them my story of that night.

Then, something caught my eye. At the base of the tree was something familiar. It was a yellow plastic bracelet. It was mine. I was using it to hold up my hair that night.

One evening, while sitting in my car, I saw that many of friends were commenting on my Frank’s Facebook wall. Saying things like rest in peace, and words of goodbyes. My friend was dead.

I couldn’t get myself to comment on his wall, but I did message back and forth with his mom and his brother. My best friends have reached out to me to hang out and talk about the whole thing, but I’m not ready.

I was supposed to meet him that day. We were supposed to hang out, but I chose to stay in. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to go out, I felt tired and got a headache trying to come up with an excuse not to go.

Now, looking at the last conversation I had with him, I just see his “whatever man, I’ll text you later”. That was his last message to me.

We were supposed to check out the new coffee shop by our high school. They were hosting an open mic night. It was supposed to be a good night, but instead he called up one of his other friends, and got in a car accident and died.

Two nights after he passed, the events started.

My phone would ring at 3am, a phone call from an abnormally long number. I picked up the first couple of times, but all I could hear was static. Once I stopped answering, I started getting random text messages from those similar numbers, but with jumbled up text characters. Like the kind you see on a corrupted computer file.

This went on for three weeks before things got scarier.

One night, I felt someone tug on my sleeve and heard my name being whispered while I was trying to sleep and my phone started ringing once again. It all happened so fast, that I thought I must have still been asleep.

Half awake, I answered it, and I heard my name being whispered. This must be some type of prank, I remember thinking. When I hung up, I kept my eyes open toward the ceiling, barely illuminated by the light coming from the window, when I heard the soft calling sound when you’re the one calling someone and are waiting for them to answer.

I was dialing some number by accident. When I checked who it was, it said I was calling Frank. Instinctively, I tapped on the button to see my call history. I was shocked to see that I had two phone calls with him in the past five minutes. One outgoing, which was my accidental dial, and one incoming, which I had apparently answered earlier. A 14 second phone call. The one where he whispered my name.

I opened up my Facebook Messenger app and tapped on his name. I stared at our last conversation on there. We were talking about some girl he was seeing. His last message on the app was him saying how I was right and that he wasn’t going to call her back. But then…

The three dots appeared. Frank Rosen is typing… then stopped. Then typing again.. I put my phone down and turned on my lights. I wanted him to send the message. Frank, I’m sorry buddy. I wanted him to know that I was going to miss him, even though we never told that to each other, ever.

He stopped typing.

“Frank, I’ll miss you man. Rest in peace.” I typed and hit send.

Since then, I haven’t been woken up by any more calls or messages.

I started writing down my dreams after looking up a dream that I had in a book that would tell you the meanings behind your dreams. I remember that met an old lady, who would come up to me, open up her coin purse, and give a dollar. Sometimes it would be in quarters, sometimes it would be a dollar bill, but I remembered counting it and it was always exactly one dollar.

It happened so often that I started looking up the meaning of the coins, the meaning of money, and the meaning of old people in my dreams. They mentioned positivity and wisdom, but it surely didn’t feel like that. The old lady had no eyes and no teeth, and her purple hand and black veins would be 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 it would be of no use since I would forget most of the dream right away. She convinced me to try it anyway, so I grabbed a cheap paper notebook and put it next to my bed. I fell asleep listening to my window fan.

I woke up suddenly, with the noise of cars and honking still in my head from the dreams slowly fading away when I wrote down the following entry:

My taxi driver dropped me off to pick up some flowers 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 $20 dollar bill and asked me to pick them up from the flower shop. No parking. Old woman gave me the change. $1. I got to my apartment and he left for cemetery.

Who knew I could remember these things? It’s like a whole other world that makes no sense.

The second morning, I wrote a shorter 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. Old lady comes by and says “well aren’t you a good boy?” and gives me a dollar, she closes my hand. Another woman comes in yelling frantically. Her baby has 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 the 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 a 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 places. My entries became more detailed, sometimes two or three pages long. I got into the habit of recording them on my cell phone and then passing them onto paper right away.

I became obsessed. These dreams were trying to tell me something, of this place I didn’t know. My friend suggests that I stop writing. Whenever I see a yellow cab, I look for the driver’s face to see if I recognize him.

But I can’t stop writing.

The unknown city in my dreams is familiar now, and I know the names of the streets now. I see the same deliverymen, and the same old lady over and over again. I’m afraid that I’ve created a different world for myself when I sleep. Like I’m living in someone else’s life.

Where is this place and who are these people? What do they want?

I’m afraid that I’ve gotten into something not many people have experienced. I’m forced to turn off my cell phone and wifi at night while I sleep after the most bizarre incident happened about six months ago. You just… never know who is listening, or maybe you don’t want to know what you can’t hear.

There is an application for iPhone that can tell you about your sleep quality. I believe you can also integrate it with your Apple Watch, but I don’t have one, so I just use the phone app itself and rely on the information it gathers. Everything was fine and I was tracking my sleep patterns, until I noticed that the app itself was requesting access to my microphone.

I found it odd, but then the app explained that it doesn’t save recordings and it doesn’t send them anywhere, so I agreed and went to sleep.

In the morning, there was a new notification saying that I snored, and I was curious enough to check them. Sure enough, there I was, at 1:20am, some snoring. I never knew that I snored, but it was good to know.

There’s something eerie about listening to yourself sleep. I kept on with the app as usual. Normally you have to set it right before you go to sleep, and it wakes you up to an alarm at an optimal time, supposedly to prevent you from waking up feeling tired.

One morning, I woke up earlier than usual. Way earlier, actually. At 4:45am. I wasn’t feeling tired, so I went to the bathroom, then for a drink of water and got back to my room. It was still dark out. That’s when I noticed the app had several recordings caught overnight. More snoring.

Curious, I clicked on the first one, at 2:14am, and there I was… breathing loudly. But then, I gasped. In my sleep. I couldn’t believe it, so I replayed the 15 second recording only to hear another voice in there. The voice was a woman’s voice saying “all alone”. I replayed the audio more than 10 times before moving onto the second one.

“Not like that” “All alone”

It kept replaying, over and over. The next recording said the same thing, but the last of the recordings was what really got me. It was… singing.

It was a lullaby. I could hear it faintly, like the wind.

The Backstory For This Episode

Never record yourself while you sleep if you’re not ready to see yourself unconscious, or in a semi-conscious state. We behave differently under varying circumstances, and I guarantee you that you do not behave the way that you expect to. When I was a kid, I used to wake up to the sound of my own voice, mentioning names and warning others to watch out for the “woman with the hat”.

Though there are things that are called “sleep studies” that are meant to help you analyze various medical conditions and are completely normal, it is something very different when a professional is analyzing this versus you analyzing seven to nine hours of dark footage, with the known creep factor. Several documented stories have been told over the years, some passed down, and some shown with hard evidence (video footage). Just how creepy can this get? Let’s find out.

What Happens When You Record Yourself Sleeping

For some, nothing occurs. You twist and turn at night, you may snore for a little bit, and you may hum or sleep-talk. These things are somewhat normal, but during the research for the previous story, I found a few more disturbing cases.

Sleep walking is known to happen to around 3.1% of the population, according to a Sleep Foundation article, so it is something paranormal necessarily, but waking up and standing while fixated on the wall or a window for a period of time may actually be something else.

In this case, a woman in her twenties decided to put a camera, plugged in to her computer with external storage, and set on the night-vision setting (the green-ish footage you see for night recording on TV and Youtube), before going to sleep because she was finding things moved around when she would wake up in the morning. Things like her cell phone would be unplugged and on top of her television, her curtains were wide open, and other things like that.

What she discovered was that in the middle of the night, around 2 or 3am, she would move the blankets from on top of her, sit on the edge of her bed and stare at the wall, then go back to sleep. Then she would wake up again, walk over to the window, open up the curtains, and stare out the window while making some hand gestures that she has no explanation for.

She went to get help from a sleep doctor, but she was happy that it wasn’t anything ghost or haunt related.

Another case that I read about was the woman who would wake up with bruises and scratches. She set a camera at the end of her bed, and went to sleep. This case, however, had a much more sinister explanation, or lack thereof.

As it turns out, the camera caught, over the span of three nights, a scream right before shutting off inexplicably, right around the same time at 3am. There was no explanation of the scratches or bruises, but the scream was not Susan’s (the woman with the issue), but rather a much deeper voice. She still suffers from this and is seeking an explanation.

What is it about 3am?

3am is known as the time that pure evil makes itself known, according to paranormal experts. Some say that the time is mocking the death of Jesus, who died at 3pm in the afternoon.

Should you record yourself sleeping at 3am? You should not record yourself sleeping at 3am if you fear that something paranormal is happening. You may not like what you see.

Should You Record Yourself Sleeping?

There is nothing inherently wrong with recording yourself sleeping, and it might satisfy your curious mind. Keep in mind that your subconscious and unconscious minds may do things that you are not aware that you are capable of doing, such as sleep walking, sleep talking, sitting up on your bed without an explanation, or doing odd things like staring at your partner or at the wall.

There is something mysterious about the realm of sleep that attracts us. In this state, our conscious mind does not pass along judgement and we may discover things about ourselves that we do not normally allow our minds to even see.

But are you ready to see items move next to you, your blankets pulled from the edge of your bed, or a shadow figure sliding out from under your bed and standing next to you while you sleep?

Just kidding.

Or am I?

A few months ago, I helped my mom’s friend Martha move to a new house around exit 78. She said she was happy to finally be moving out of town and joining the life in rural America. Our town wasn’t too big to begin with, but whatever.

We made two trips back and forth, moving boxes and small furniture. When it started getting dark, she pointed out some lights that appeared to be yellow headlights off into the distance. She told me that the strange lights would sometimes blink, turning on and off, on and off, many times as she passed by. Then they would turn off and not light up again. They were not blinking when we passed by.

We unloaded my truck and put the boxes in her living room, but then we agreed to make our next trip the following day instead. It was getting late and she was tired. On my way back, looking off into the distance, I noticed the lights. On and off, on and off. They were the high beams blinking. That crazy lady was right, I thought. And kept driving.

I told her about it the next morning after we finally finished moving her in. She suggested we go check it out, saying that it was part of the fun of being out in the country. I was curious so we both hopped into my truck and headed down the road. The dirt trails were rough, but we could both see a large metal structure off into the distance, like where cattle is kept. There is no way this place was operational, but we kept driving.

As we got closer, we saw what seemed like a junk yard, with old cars and broken down fencing. See, this belonged to the McCabe people. They’re long gone now, Martha said. I remember the McCabes story on the news, they were involved in gangs and illegal activities a long time ago. Kind of famous in our small town. I still remember the story.

There was a piece on the news released in the 80s about a missing man by the name of James who was thought to have been murdered. He was a family man and it turns out that he was a close friend of my parents. They even wanted him to be my godfather back when I was born.

They looked for his body in the hills and in the forest, but after many years, the searches stopped and the family was forced to live with all of those questions. He used to unload trucks for grocery stores, and he was actually supposed to be working the day he was last seen.

He was instructed to empty out one of the older trucks, a trailer with empty boxes and old cement blocks. The owner had been trying to get rid of it for quite some time, and was happy to finally have a buyer. James had actually introduced them two, saying that they knew each other from some past businesses they had worked on together.

The trailer was driven off the lot, but on the way to the buyer’s yard about ten miles down the road, it shut down. Feeling tricked, the buyer, a close friend to the McCabe’s got two of his buddies to take him back to the seller’s business and demand his money back.

There was an altercation there and the buyer took out a gun and shot the seller along with James, dragging their bodies onto a car and throwing them off on the side of a road. The seller’s body was found a couple of days later, but the body James was never found. Or so the story used to go.

We were ready to leave the junkyard after making a couple of circles around the property when suddenly, clear as day, we heard some short, sporadic deep honking.

I was scared, since nobody should be there and there was zero chance that any of the cars there would be in working order, but the honking became longer and harder to ignore. We both looked at each other, waiting for the other to say something.

I was going to find out what that was. I got out of the truck, and Martha followed behind me. We went around the structure, coming closer to the honking, when we spotted a small truck with a trailer off a few yards away. Then the noise stopped.

We looked at each other again. Honestly, I was glad someone was there with me.

As I inched closer to the truck and into the driver side’s door, I heard the honking begin again and then fade and then stop. When I turned my back on the truck, it made clicking sounds. Some type of animal must be hiding under the hood.

Suddenly, I heard the back door of the truck swing open. It was Martha, being the crazy woman that she’s always been, poking her nose in everywhere.

After the second door swung open, she screamed. Inside the truck, by the door, was a dried up corpse. All curled up.

Reports later found that it was the body of James. A block had struck him in the head. He had regained consciousness after the matter but was unable to open the gate from the inside. All that was left of him after thirty years, was a shriveled up body… that, and the will to someday be found again.