A Presence in Every Room

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] Do you want to hear true paranormal stories? Stories that will terrify and stick with you? Well, that's why we're here, right? So if you like True Scary Story, you're gonna love Monsters Among Us. It's a podcast where you get chilling true stories from real people every week. There was one from Julie who drives past a car accident and then realizes that a spirit has just joined her in the passenger seat. And then an anonymous caller shared an eerie story about a time slip after seeing three strange entities in the woods.

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_00] So whether you're a skeptic or a true believer, this is the perfect podcast to fuel your fascination with the paranormal and send shivers down your spine. Listen to Monsters Among Us podcast now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[00:00:45] [SPEAKER_02] And then I got this weird thought in my head. That's not a good fact.

[00:00:51] [SPEAKER_03] It looked right at me as I thought it. Like it looked through me.

[00:00:59] [SPEAKER_00] This is a chilling true story of a family haunting by unexplained forces. From eerie sleep paralysis to terrifying encounters in the middle of the night. My name is Edwin. And here is Kiara's true scary story.

[00:01:23] [SPEAKER_03] I've never really shared my experiences to anyone besides my husband, my family, and really close friends. I remember being around seven years old when everything started. We lived in an apartment in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We moved in shortly after my sister had her baby. And my mom watched him a lot.

[00:01:52] [SPEAKER_03] We babysat him all the time. I remember she went to the mailbox and so she left him on the bed and she was like, hey, do me a favor. Just watch him. Make sure he doesn't roll off or anything. And if he cries, just give him his pacifier. And I just sat on the bed watching him.

[00:02:19] [SPEAKER_03] When all of a sudden the bathroom was right there next to that bed. I could hear the faucet, like the sink turn on. And I looked over and I can see well into the bathroom. There was nobody in there. My body froze. I was terrified. Then all of a sudden the shower turned on as well.

[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_03] I just sat there and I watched my nephew. I didn't want to look back at the bathroom. Even though out of the corner of my eye I could see a steam coming out of that shower. And my mom walks in. And she was like, hey, why is the water running in the bathroom? And I said nothing to her and I just walked out. I just kind of left it at that.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_03] Shortly after that, I started experiencing sleep paralysis and nightmares all the time. I've always been a horror fan. So I would chalk it up to that. And every time I would wake up, it felt like immense pressure on my chest and I couldn't move. It was such a terrifying experience. And I remember being awake. But being so young, I really didn't believe that it was actually happening.

[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_03] This happened night after night after night. I would wake up suddenly. I would be terrified. But I didn't know why. So my first instinct would be to try to get up. And I can't. I remember being able to blink my eyes open. But nothing else would move. I remember distinctively seeing my closet door was like right across the way from my bed. And I always slept with it open.

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_03] So it was never an issue. But I remember distinctively seeing a shadowy figure. And I would close my eyes and open them to see if it would go away. And it would feel like maybe a few minutes for it to like dissipate. And it wasn't until my cousin came to live with us a few months after that. She had just had a baby and she had moved here to be with family.

[00:04:48] [SPEAKER_03] At that point, me and her were sharing a room. And so we had two twins kind of next to each other with a little bit of walkroom space in the middle. We had a bathroom right across the hall. And so we slept with the door open all the time. Well, that particular weekend, my parents left town. So it was just me and my cousin and her newborn baby. If that door was open and you walked to the bathroom and you flicked the light on, obviously that light shines directly to where my bed is.

[00:05:17] [SPEAKER_03] The light flicked on and so it woke me up. And so I just kind of was trying to turn away from the light. I turned over to my side, to my right side, because that's where she was sleeping. Try to get comfortable again. And I opened my eyes and she was laying there with her baby wide awake. And I looked and I was so confused because there's no one supposed to be in this house besides me and her. And I looked at her and I kind of was like trying to wake up and being like, wait, what's happening?

[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_03] And she looked at me and just put her finger over her mouth to be quiet. You could hear someone walking around in the bathroom and then you could hear them in the bathroom. I had like the curiosity, like, I want to see because all I had to do is turn to look to see who it is. The toilet flushed. You could hear the steps. The light turned on and there was nobody that came out of that bathroom.

[00:06:15] [SPEAKER_03] And I just stared at that empty walkway right there to the bathroom and no one ever came out. I turned back over and me and her stayed awake staring at each other the entire night. After that, I would be in the living room by myself watching TV and we had like this long old style shaggy carpet in this apartment. I would hear footsteps of that carpet that I would never see somebody.

[00:06:43] [SPEAKER_03] And it sounded like they were walking right around me and I could never tell what it was. It was like my body would realize that it was something not natural. Like, you know, when you hear footsteps, you are going to assume it's a family member. So you would turn and look and it never felt that way. It was always like I got the feeling right before I would experience these things, like the footsteps, like the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. I would freeze.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_03] And there was always this really eerie, deafening silence. I lived like that for six months living in that apartment. One Christmas, we were all making tamales and sitting around the table and just chatting it up. And my mom starts talking about how she's been experiencing things around the apartment.

[00:07:40] [SPEAKER_03] My dad was a very nonbeliever. He's a Christian man. He never wanted to talk about stuff like that. He was like, what are you talking about? Nothing happens in this apartment. And she was like, oh, I woke up the other night and I turned over and I saw a man standing by this big dresser that they used to own wearing a hat. She called him the cowboy, a shadowy figure. And you could see like the cowboy hat right there, right by her bed.

[00:08:09] [SPEAKER_03] She turned over to like wake my dad up. And when they both turned around, he was no longer there. And I remember just sitting there silent because as people were coming with their stories, I started to feel relief. But at the same time, I felt so much dread because I knew that it wasn't just my imagination that other people were experiencing this in the apartment.

[00:08:33] [SPEAKER_03] And in that moment, when everyone's sitting there sharing their stories of what was going on, the blender in the kitchen turned on and just completely fell off the counter. And it wasn't even plugged in. Whatever it was, whatever entity, whatever spirit, it really liked to isolate us.

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_03] But that moment that we all started sharing our experiences, it got mad that it couldn't bully us individually anymore. That's when it started to like amp up a little bit. The apartment that we lived in was on the second story. And so to get to our apartment, you had to go up the stairs and cross, which would be the master windows, to the door. There's a light out there.

[00:09:26] [SPEAKER_03] So at night when the light's on, you can see when somebody's going to come and knock on the door. My uncle was supposed to come over that night to give my dad a check or something. I remember we were waiting for him and we're sitting in that master bedroom watching TV. And we see the shadow of somebody coming to the door. My dad, you know, that's me and he's like, hey, your uncle's here. Will you open the door real quick? I jump up as I'm running to the door.

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_03] I'm like side by side, moving the shadow to the door. I open it real quick before he can knock. And there's nobody there. After my dad experiencing something like that, I think it really scared him because shortly after he started to see things himself, which hadn't happened yet.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_03] But he would see what he believed my mother going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. All of a sudden, my mom would be walking in from a living room. The bathroom light is on. The door shut like he caught the back of a woman that looks very similar to my mother. Go into the bathroom, shut the door. And there would be nobody in the bathroom. Things like that continuously kept happening.

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_03] At that point, I was sleeping in her bed all the time because I was terrified. Like I obviously knew this wasn't a dream anymore. It wasn't my imagination. So I would sleep between them a lot. And there would be times where I wake up because I hear somebody walking and I can hear the carpet. And I would get up and sit straight up and just kind of like follow the sound and see if I could see anything. I would never be able to see anything. And I would notice my dad's awake and I'm like, hey, do you hear that?

[00:11:18] [SPEAKER_03] He's like, just go to bed. Just go to bed. It's fine. So he would brush it off a lot to not draw attention to it, I guess. The last instance in that apartment, my sister had come over to spend time with me and my cousin and my mom. We're sitting in the living room. So that bathroom that's like right across the hall from my bedroom, that's behind us.

[00:11:47] [SPEAKER_03] The kitchen's a little bit in front of us towards the right side. And so we're just sitting watching the TV. And all of a sudden we hear plates breaking. A ton of them. The three of us get up and look in the kitchen. I'm like, mom, are you okay? Like what happened? She looked up at us and she's like, that wasn't me. And the bathroom door right across from my room shook us immediately after she says that.

[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_03] But we walk over and we're trying to open the bathroom door and it won't budge. We're trying with all of our way, each of us take turns and it just won't open. And so my mom at this point is really freaked out. So she calls 911. They came out and they could not open the door without breaking it down. They use an ax to break the door down. And I was like, this is insane. Like what is happening? There was nothing in there.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_03] Nothing holding the door back. Like they couldn't explain like what was going on. And so as soon as they got through that door, they noticed that the mirror in the bathroom, that huge mirror, it had broken and shattered all over the floor. My mom was livid because she was saying like, what if one of my kids was in there? Like they would have gotten extremely hurt. The apartment complex had their insurance people come out and look at it.

[00:13:11] [SPEAKER_03] And they said that the screws that held the mirror in place, they were screws, like actual screws. These plastic bits that were screwed into the wall, they had been turned. And so they started to blame my mother that she was responsible for the damages of that mirror. Because obviously somebody had gone in there, loosened those screws and moved the plastic pieces for it to be able to fall. My mom was arguing back and forth for like a week with the apartment complex because she was like,

[00:13:41] [SPEAKER_03] how would somebody possibly go loosen it, burn the knobs and run out before the mirror came back and broke on them? Like it's not physically possible. We moved out maybe two weeks after that. We ended up moving. It was in the same building, just a different apartment because we couldn't really afford to go anywhere else. I still suffered sleep paralysis pretty bad.

[00:14:12] [SPEAKER_03] I remember this distinctive one where I was watching myself sleep. And all of a sudden, this black shadowy figure came over me and like grabbed me by my wrist. I woke up in that moment that it grabbed me. I was almost in a star shape when I woke up. I could feel the pressure of where it had grabbed me in the dream on my arms. That pressure was still there.

[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_03] And I remember when I woke up really quickly, I was covered in sweat, cold, cold sweat. I tried to scream because I slept with the door open, right? Especially after all this had happened. So my parents were just down the hall. Nothing came out. Somehow, I ended up falling back asleep. I woke up and I could still feel that pressure on my arms.

[00:15:08] [SPEAKER_03] Shortly after that, I think we stayed in that apartment complex just another six months. And we moved to a house. Maybe 10 minutes from there, things just fell worse. It was my freshman year of high school. And we had moved into this beautiful home. And it was so lovely. The neighborhood was brand new. We started really going to church a lot.

[00:15:37] [SPEAKER_03] My mother was Catholic. She left Catholicism and just strictly Christian. So we started going to this new church all the time. I really enjoyed the church. It was great. I started noticing my parents would argue a lot on Sundays over anything. Over my mom taking too long. Over my dad not being ready. It changed every weekend. There was one specific one where I remember them being really mad at each other.

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_03] And that wasn't very normal for my parents. I woke up. I got changed for church. And I walked out of my bedroom. The layout was kind of weird. So you walked into the living room. And if you rounded the bin, the kitchen was out of view. But I could hear them in the kitchen going at it. Straight through the living room or backyard, there was like a door. I noticed this black cat sitting there by the door.

[00:16:35] [SPEAKER_03] Super green eyes. So I was like, oh, look at the kitty. And I go over to the cat and I start like tapping on the window like, you know, here kitty kitty. And it wouldn't look at me. And I noticed that it was just dead staring at my parents arguing. And then I got this weird thought in my head. I'll remember thinking, that's not a cat. You're not a cat. But it looked right at me as I thought it.

[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_03] Like it looked through me. I remember feeling so much dread when it looked at me. And I got almost angry because at that point, we hadn't experienced anything in the house. I opened the backyard door and shoot it away. And it went and it curbed up on the fence, just staring at me. And it took off. I told my dad about the experience. And I was like, hey, I would really like a dog, you know, just to kind of keep the cats away.

[00:17:37] [SPEAKER_03] So we got Sadie and she was my first dog. Even when we got a dog, it never went away. We would catch her barking outside a lot in the specific part of our fence. Every time we'd go and check, it was always like two, three in the morning that she would go crazy in the backyard. I mean, like super barrel at the fence. I always felt like it was like something demonic, that cat.

[00:18:07] [SPEAKER_03] But it was never like allowed back, like into the fence because my dog would try to get it. It would try to get it all the time. There was one night that my mom said that she heard Sadie barking like crazy. And so she went out to check on her to make sure that an animal was in the backyard. She turned on the light that illuminated the entire backyard. And she saw a shadow on the fence. There was no way that shadow could be there because the light is illuminating everything.

[00:18:39] [SPEAKER_03] It was standing on the fence and then it ran off into the shadows. We understood why she was barking because obviously she was seeing something. And my mom had seen it too.

[00:19:04] [SPEAKER_03] After that, the experiences in the house started when I became friends with my neighbor. She started going to church with me a lot. One day she comes over to my house pretty frantic. She was like, well, I haven't been wanting to tell you. But ever since I started going to church with you, I feel like a lot of weird stuff has been happening to me. There was this one time that I came home from school and my parents and my brothers weren't back yet.

[00:19:32] [SPEAKER_03] And her layout is very similar to my layout of the house where if you're standing washing dishes, you can have a clear view of like the backyard and, you know, the door. She said she was doing dishes and she looked out. She saw a little boy in her backyard playing with a ball. The way her house was positioned, it was at the end of the street. So her regular garage and on the side, there was like an outdoor made from wood garage.

[00:19:59] [SPEAKER_03] And it basically like had one of those stakes that came into the ground. So to lift open that door, you'd have to lift the metal stake out of the ground and push it. And it was a heavy door. She walked out to be like, hey, you can't be here. She saw that little boy run that way. So she followed him. That ball that he was holding was on the floor in the corner. Little boy was nowhere to be seen.

[00:20:28] [SPEAKER_03] A week later, she said that she was using her guest bathroom. When she got up to pull her pants up, she said she felt a pressure on her leg. An immense pressure. So she looked down to look at her leg and that little boy was wrapped around it, like hugging her leg. She freaked out so bad that she was trying to get him off of her. But she fell backwards into the tub and like brought the whole rod down with her.

[00:20:55] [SPEAKER_03] At that point, that's when she had come over to my house because she was so scared. She didn't want to be by herself anymore. One time we were in the pool, me and her. We were getting in an argument about something. I couldn't even tell you what it is. It's been so long now. But she basically was like, well, I hope that little boy follows you home. I remember like being so mad. And I was like, why would you say that?

[00:21:23] [SPEAKER_03] And she was like, yeah, I hope he follows you home because I'm tired of this. And sure enough, he did follow me home. My bedroom is also attached to my brother's bedroom. I'm on one side. There's a long hallway all the way towards the back. His bedroom is there. And then there's a bathroom between our two bedrooms.

[00:21:52] [SPEAKER_03] I had the door open in my bedroom and I was watching a TV show. I was wanting it to cut to commercial because I had to go to the bathroom really bad. I had been holding it the whole time, but I didn't want to miss like a single minute of this episode. I'm sitting there and I'm kind of doing the pee dance when my door is open. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I can see my nephew walking towards the bathroom. And I'm like, dang, he beat me to it.

[00:22:20] [SPEAKER_03] I run immediately to my mom's bathroom because I had got to go. I get there. I open her bedroom door and my nephew is sitting on the bed. I remember looking at him and I was like, did you use the bathroom that fast? And he's like, I didn't go to the bathroom. And then I went into her bathroom and my mom's in the bathroom. So it was just the three of us at home.

[00:22:47] [SPEAKER_03] I remember thinking about that instance a lot and just kind of letting it go because I really didn't want it to be true. I didn't want to think that he actually followed me home. I could be doing anything, watching TV in the living room. And I would see out of like the peripheral of my eye, the shape of a little boy walking by. My brother, he's older.

[00:23:16] [SPEAKER_03] I believe he was going into the Marines when he was home from basic training and I was home alone again. And so he was like, hey, do you want to do like a movie night? And I was like, yeah, let's do it. So we stayed up all night watching horror movies and he fell asleep in the living room. The next morning I get up, he's still passed out on the couch. And so I go and start making pancakes. He starts waking up and he goes, I didn't know my nephew. I didn't know that he stayed the night.

[00:23:45] [SPEAKER_03] I saw him in the middle of the night. He was standing right there in the hallway by your bedroom. And I was like, no, he wasn't because he's not here. My nephew did not stay the night. And he was like, yes, he did. I woke up two in the morning and I looked over and he was standing there. And I told him, go to bed. It's late. And he turned around and went into your bedroom. I didn't tell my brother about anything that happened.

[00:24:14] [SPEAKER_03] My brother is very, he does not believe in that at all. And at the time he was an atheist. He just did not believe in any of it. So I just kind of kept things to myself. I had a best friend at the time in high school. She came and spent the night with me and my mom because my dad was away for the weekend. And we were trying to open this bag of chicken nuggets and it was like a really thick bag. So I was like, will you go to my desk and just grab the pair of scissors that are on it?

[00:24:44] [SPEAKER_03] And she goes, tell, I'll be right back. She goes to my bedroom and she comes back. He is like white as a ghost. He was gripping the scissors really hard. She's like, there's a little boy standing in the hallway. She was completely freaked out because she had never in her life experienced anything like that. That made her turn to God because she was just like, it does exist. You know, something exists out there.

[00:25:14] [SPEAKER_03] And so that was a pretty bad experience for her. She didn't want to spend the night. So we all ended up spending the night in the living room for all of us to stay together. One time we had a few of our church members come and we read the Bible, we prayed. I think it was like in the middle of worship that we heard the phone go off.

[00:25:41] [SPEAKER_03] It sounded like, you know, a pop song, like a woman singing. My dad glared at me and he's like, I told you to turn your cell phone off. Sure enough, my phone was off. But that singing was coming from like behind where the group was towards the chimney. I remember everyone in that prayer group turning and looking from where the singing was going on. Behind the wall of the chimney is the yard.

[00:26:11] [SPEAKER_03] So it's like right against that wall. And so my dad and, you know, a couple of the guys got up and went to the backyard and nothing. We didn't know where the sound came from. Me and my dad loved to prank each other, especially back then. We did it all the time. One day he goes to my uncle's house. Me and my mom were sitting in her room watching TV. And all of a sudden you hear like a man whistling.

[00:26:42] [SPEAKER_03] Her door is open. So the living room is completely pitch black. My mom nudges me and she goes, it's your dad trying to scare us again. Yep, sure is. And I'm like, ha ha, dad, very funny. You got us. And we heard nothing. So I pull out my cell phone and my dad always has his phone on loud. So I call him and it starts ringing. And then he picks up and he's like, hey, I'll be home in 10 minutes.

[00:27:12] [SPEAKER_03] I'm almost done here. And he hangs up. And my mom heard the phone call. She was like, then what is that? And I remember getting up and I shut the door and I locked it. And we stayed there until my dad came home. It was just stuff like that. That happened all the time. And we just kind of like learned to live with it. My sister ended up moving in that house for a while.

[00:27:41] [SPEAKER_03] And there was one weekend where her kids were with their dad. And I was home alone. So it was just me and her for that weekend. She had come home from the club around 2 a.m. And she had gotten a ride from a friend. She was pretty toasted. She comes into my bedroom. And starts telling me about her night. And when she's talking to me, I start hearing this tea kettle sound. Like when you're boiling water in a kettle.

[00:28:10] [SPEAKER_03] And it starts to like whistle. And I could faintly start hearing that. I catch her looking towards the door. And she's like, are you making tea? And I was like, we don't have a tea kettle. And it stops. And she's like, hmm, must be the TV. She kept on going on about her night. And all of a sudden, I hear these heavy footsteps.

[00:28:40] [SPEAKER_03] It sounded like starched pants walking. As she's talking to me, I'm like listening to these things. And she looks over back at the door. And she's like, what is that? And the footsteps start to get faster. Like it's running to the room. And out of instinct, I got up. And I shut the door and locked it. And the footsteps stopped.

[00:29:12] [SPEAKER_03] She was screaming her head off. She was so scared. And that wasn't helping me. Because I'm like in fight or flight mode at this point. She was like, we have to call the cops. We have to call the cops. And I'm like, and say what? The doors were locked. There's nobody in here. And I was like, okay, listen. In two minutes, we're going to run out the door. Like run out of my bedroom. And run out the front door. And just look at the gas station. Which was like maybe a two-minute walk from where we were at. So I open the door. She takes off running before I do.

[00:29:41] [SPEAKER_03] And then I follow her. As I'm running, I see that the back door is wide open. The TV is at max volume. And all of the lights are on. Like in the entire house. All the lights have been turned on. I start running behind her. When we get to like the end of our street while I stop. And I'm like, hang on. I remember standing there and trying to collect my thoughts of what to do. All of a sudden you could hear those same footsteps running towards us. In the darkness.

[00:30:14] [SPEAKER_03] We took off running to the gas station. And once we got there, we ended up calling some friends. And they ended up coming. When we found the house, just had found it when we ran out of that room. All the lights were on. The TV was at max volume. There was nobody there. I remember that being the most terrifying experience that I had had there. Because I had never really been aggressive since the apartment.

[00:30:42] [SPEAKER_03] But whatever that was, the presence was heavy. It was dense. It was awful. And my sister has never forgotten that experience. Like she still talks about it till this day. There was one specific time that I had this dream. We were in that house. I remember watching myself interact with my parents. And Green Me asked my dad if he could go to a concert.

[00:31:11] [SPEAKER_03] And my dad said, no, you can't go to the concert. You're going to stay home tonight. The person in my dream, that's me, literally grabs the bat and hit my dad over the back of the head with it. And my dad fell face first on the table. I remember thinking, watching this happen, like, what are you doing? Like, you can't do that. You can't go to jail. That's assault. Like, that's my dad, you know? It slowly starts to transform into something else because it doesn't any longer look like me.

[00:31:40] [SPEAKER_03] It looks almost twisted. Like, it was so distorted. It was weird. And then she turned to look at me with, like, this horrific smile. And in that moment, I knew it wasn't me anymore that I was looking at. And it stood there and it smiled at me. And I was so terrified that I just remember praying in that moment. And I kept rebuking it in the name of Jesus. And the smile dropped from its face immediately.

[00:32:08] [SPEAKER_03] And that was the first time I saw it almost be scared. I woke up. That was, like, my turning point of, like, it really doesn't have power over me. You give stuff power. Things like that fed it off your fear. And so I stopped being scared halfway through high school. I was just tired. This stuff would happen daily. And it was just so draining to be scared that I honestly was annoyed when it happened all.

[00:32:38] [SPEAKER_03] I'd feel something in the room, like a heavy presence. I'm like, you don't belong here. And you're not allowed to be here. And you would go away. Like, I would no longer feel a heavy presence or dread or fear. Finally, we moved out to West Texas. I was taking a break from college. But I moved here. And my parents were renting out this old home.

[00:33:06] [SPEAKER_03] When I first moved in, we got another dog because our dog had tragically passed. I got him during October. And it's really cold out in West Texas. Like, if you get towards desert, like, the cold is cold. That house was so old that the windows weren't properly sealed anymore. But my parents weren't going to do the ceiling because they rented on this home, you know? Like, they didn't want to be the ones paying for it.

[00:33:34] [SPEAKER_03] So we would sleep with all these heavy Mexican blankets. As it got colder in the, like, fall and winter, he was my puppy Shiner. He would sleep in the house. There was one night that he was sleeping on the bed, just on the outside of the covers. I felt him, like, adjust. And then he kept adjusting. But he started, like, instead of being on the side of me, he started adjusting on me.

[00:34:03] [SPEAKER_03] He wasn't super small. He was a German Shepherd puppy. But they get big pretty fast. And so I was, like, trying to move him while these blankets are on top of my head. Like, because it's so cold. I'm literally trying to adjust him and move him to the side. And he just keeps coming back up. And as I'm pushing him down, he settles for a little bit. And then he's trying to adjust on top of me. And at one point, he is, like, directly on top of my face. And I got really tired of adjusting him. So I was like, all right, you're going to go and sleep down on the floor.

[00:34:33] [SPEAKER_03] And so I go to take off my blankets. But as I'm doing that, I'm also pushing him down. He ended up falling. And I heard him put the ground pretty hard. And I was like, I think I just heard him. I didn't mean to, like, swing him off of me so hard. So I get up. And I'm trying to, like, beckon him with my hand. And I'm like, obviously, he went under the bed, you know, because I can't see him immediately on the floor. And so I was like, come, Shiner. I'm sorry. You can sleep on the bed. Like, I didn't mean to swing you off that hard. He wouldn't come.

[00:35:03] [SPEAKER_03] I get up, turn on the light, and get on my hands and knees and look under the bed to be like, come on, puppy. And he was not there. My bedroom door is shut. Where is this dog? I get up, open the door, walk to my parents' bedroom, and he is sleeping on the foot of my parents' bed.

[00:35:39] [SPEAKER_03] I don't know if it's followed us or it's just, I always like to believe that I was just always sensitive. My mother has always been sensitive to things like this. I've been sensitive. My main babysitter when I was younger, every time my mom would go pick her up, she's like, have you taken her to get baptized? Because she says stuff that scares me sometimes. I grabbed my husband's stomach the other day and said that he was going to die. And it made us really uncomfortable.

[00:36:07] [SPEAKER_03] Granted, I'm like three years old at this point. And my mom's like, I'm so sorry. Like, yes, I'll take her to church. Her husband died of stomach cancer three years later. My mom, she used to tell me, like, that she believed in reincarnation. Like, she used to tell me, like, I really think that you were born with a gift, a bond in our culture is what they called it. There was one day that she asked me, I'm two years old. And she walks up and she asked me, who are you?

[00:36:37] [SPEAKER_03] Not what's my name. But if you went up to a kid and been like, who are you? The kid would respond, I'm Chiara. I'm two years old. You know, like a normal answer. And I looked at her and I said, you know who I am. She believed that it was her younger brother who had died of leukemia when he was really young. She said that I had, like, that same look in my eye. Like, it didn't look like a kid. Like, it was really weird.

[00:37:06] [SPEAKER_03] And I mean, obviously don't remember any of this stuff. My mom said that I used to walk around with, like, a deck of cards when I was younger. Like, three, four, around there. And at the time, my sister and my cousin, who I've talked about previously, they are both the same age. And so they were with their future baby daddies. When I was younger, they were with them for a long time. They were already kind of dating them when I was this age.

[00:37:34] [SPEAKER_03] And my cousin comes up to me. And she's like, well, why don't you tell me my future? And I literally looked at her and I was like, your boyfriend's never going to stay with you. And he didn't. Like, they had babies and everything, but he did not stay with her. And she would always call me a witch. She did not like to be around me at all. I feel like a lot of people were scared of me when I was really young. But the younger thing, I can't explain it.

[00:38:00] [SPEAKER_03] Like, why don't I remember this stuff unless there was somebody else's spirit there? I think it is God-given. I don't think anyone has it, but it is pretty terrifying having it as a kid because you feel really cursed. You feel scared all the time. And I remember feeling terrified a lot of my childhood. And then when I got older, it just, I don't know, it kind of became like this normal.

[00:38:30] [SPEAKER_03] And I don't fear it anymore. I believe in God. I believe that there's another side, but I don't believe in religion per se. But it is a bond. I don't know what else it could be. There are still times where it's so weird that I can feel sleep paralysis come on.

[00:38:56] [SPEAKER_03] I want to say a couple months ago, it was the first time in years since I've experienced that. And I was falling asleep, and all of a sudden, I could hear a woman laughing. But I was in that in-between of almost asleep, but not quite there. And I could hear her laughing in my ear. So I woke up real quick, and I felt my legs. They were super, super heavy. And I was like, oh, no, you don't. Not in this house.

[00:39:23] [SPEAKER_03] I've been living in my apartment with my husband for going on five years. That's the first time that that's happened to me in years. And so I was so upset that this was happening now, because I haven't had anything paranormal really. Here in my home, which it is my safe space, I make sure I pray all the time. And I'm like, hey, this is a house of God. Nothing negative. I do not accept.

[00:39:49] [SPEAKER_03] I have one of those evil eye hanging above my doorway, my front door. I make sure to keep bad vibes out of my house. I just don't like taking that stuff home. I know what it is to live with that kind of stuff. So I'm really particular about things like that. But I was so mad when that happened to me a couple months ago that I forced myself to sit up. And I was like, get out of my house. Whatever you are, you are not welcome here. And it completely went away.

[00:40:18] [SPEAKER_03] I'm really quick to shut it down. Because I don't like, like, it's almost like you don't have a choice whether to be spared when you're in a full sleep paralysis. Like it's fear off the bat. And that is such a horrible feeling. I always know that it's something paranormal about to happen to me because my body reacts before my mind does. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. My body freezes. You know what I mean? Like a fear.

[00:40:46] [SPEAKER_03] Like, but the deafening silence, that, when that happens, it didn't happen a whole lot. But I remember the handful of times where it's so silent, the silence was loud. Like it was deafening. It's, it's, that's like the worst. I hate that. I don't know why that happens, but I hate that feeling. The feeling's awful. When I talk to really close friends about their experiences, I can feel their fear. Like it's palpable.

[00:41:16] [SPEAKER_03] Maybe that's because I'm sensitive or something, but I'm like, okay, stop right there. You are okay. You are safe. But you got to lose that because like fear is contagious. I don't really think anything can hurt you unless you let it. Like you have to give it consent. There are some stuff that we can't control. But when I was younger, I got into like demonology and loved like learning as much as I could because I didn't want to be scared anymore. Let me tell you, looking into that stuff, stuff gets scary.

[00:41:47] [SPEAKER_03] For Catholicism, like I've done my research in that and apparently demonic possession, they are not allowed to possess you unless you get the permission. And a lot of the time it's not so straightforward as in, you know, I give you permission to possess me. It comes out of fear of you feeling unworthy, of you feeling guilt, shame. And a lot of people believe that that's why people get possessed because they did something

[00:42:15] [SPEAKER_03] so horrible in their life that they don't deserve to be loved by God. And it's almost like inviting it in.

[00:42:29] [SPEAKER_00] Thank you, Kiara, for sharing your experience with us. If you have a true scary story that you want to tell, please go to truescarystory.com and fill out the form. As always, you can support the show and get early access to stories without ads by trying out Scary Plus over at scaryplus.com. It's our subscription that's free for 14 days and $4.99 a month after that. Cancel whenever you want. Scheduling for this episode was by Bianca Chavez.

[00:42:57] [SPEAKER_00] Editing and sound design by Sarah Voorhees-Wendel from VW Sound. An additional production by me, Edwin Covarrubias and the Scary FM team. If you're subscribed, we'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.