Between Realms: The True Story of a Family Haunting

We all kind of just like didn't pay it any attention. But then after a moment, I was like, why is no one coming inside. One family's faith is put to the ultimate test, from unexplained footsteps and flying bibles to a mysterious object above a California lake. Here are a lifetime of experiences with the paranormal. My name is Edwin, and here is Kay's true scary story. My name is Kay. I grew up in California. I was born and raised in the Monterey Bay area. My family is Mexican American. We grew up going back and forth between the US and Mexico pretty frequently, especially when I was a child. We were pretty close with our extended family back then, so Grandma's still so we'd frequently go and convene at her house. It's a small pueblo close to Guadalajara. It was one of those summers that we went to go visit my extended family in Jalisco, and so we were staying at my aunt's house. My aunt has this big, three story house with a flat rooftop. It's close to the edge of town, so there's a bunch of fields beyond it. I always thought it was a beautiful house, but you know, there's something about Mexico where, you know, the second the sun goes down, there's a little bit of an energy shift and it just feels a little spookier. I was about six or seven years old at the time, so this was, you know, in the early two thousands. I was in the big master room on the second floor, sleeping in you know, the same room with all my cousins. So it was a big family gathering, and so we were all kind of together there. As one of the eldest of the younger cousins, I got to sleep on the actual bed. So I was really excited because there was a TV in that room, and growing up my parents didn't really let us watch much TV at home. I knew that they had Disney Channel. I was really excited to get to watch a movie or something. Once everyone fell asleep, but knowing me, my mom decided that she was gonna, you know, kind of sneak the remote away, and she actually tucked it under her own pillow in the room that was adjacent to ours. So I just kind of waited until, you know, it was nice and dark. Everyone went to bed, and I snuck out of bed and went over to my mom's room real quietly, and I managed to somehow sneak the remote from under her pillow. And you know, me being a sneaky seven year old, I was pretty content with myself as I walked back to the masterroom. I got into bed, I turned on the TV, turned it to Disney channel, made sure the volume was real low so no one would wake up. And I remember being so excited. I wasn't scared at all, you know, I wasn't you know, thinking about, you know, anything spooky that was about to happen. I finished the movie and I was like, all right, you know, time I go to bed. I went. I put the remote back under my mom's pillow so she wouldn't suspect a thing in the morning, and I come back into the room. I explicitly remember closing the door and locking it. I walk over to the bed. I was on the side of the bed that was closest to the door. There's no ic so the fan was on and I was just trying to get some breeze. It was kind of warm in there. There's a lot of bodies in there, a lot of cousins. I remember just like thinking about you know how much fun I had watching the movie. All of a sudden, the door just slowly creaks open, and the thing is like, I don't really hear it open, but I just kind of see the darkness of the hallway start to appear. That's when like it catches my peripheral vision. I was pretty confused because it was how fuck I thought i'd lock that door. So I get that up and I close it and I lock it and I make sure that it's locked and it's closed right, and that it's not going to open again, because that hallway it's pretty spooky. It's pretty dark in there. There's a skylight that goes up to the roof of the house, which is another kind of spooky place at night. I get back in bed. A few seconds later, the door just starts to open again. I am, at this point starting to get a little scared. No one else is awake. I'm the only one that's up, and I look up at the fan. I'm like, it has to be the fan, you know. I'm trying to rationalize this so I don't scare myself too much. It's not to be the fan. The fan is what, you know, blew the door opens, and how even though I'd been sure that I locked it, I kind of have to like get the courage to get out of bed this time, and I force myself. I run over to the door, I close it, I lock it. I run over to the bed, and I was sharing the bed with my sister. I was like, you know what, she's asleep, She's not going to be scared, just setting closer to the door. So I pushed her to the eat side of the bed that was closest to the door, and I laid down on the opposite side, threw the blanket over my head and just turned over and closed eyes. Eventually I fell asleep. The next day, I had talked to my aunt about it. We were in the kitchen, we were cooking. She just kind of giggles a little bit. She goes, Oh, yeah, stuff like that happens in this house all the time. She told me a little bit about how, you know, sometimes they would hear different dishes clattering downstairs, or like someone was making a meal in the middle of the night and there was nothing going on down there. That was kind of my first kind of priming of like, oh, sometimes things are a little scary. Sometimes things are a little weird and we can't really explain it. Later that week, we were all sitting outside of my grandma's house, which is a town over. It's about like a ten minute drive between the town, so it's very close, and it's a row of houses, but they're all connected. Sometimes there's kind of like a big corral between some sections of the house. It's a little bit difficult to explain, but we were sitting right outside of my grandma's house. We were sitting on these nice leather chairs that my grandpa had woven earlier on in his ears. We were just like a lot of people just like to sit in the street and talk in the evenings, just kind of how Mexico is. It kind of comes alive in the evenings. Everyone's eating, everyone's socializing, chatting. It was my family, my grandparents, my uncle, and a bunch of my aunts and cousins, and we were just sitting in a circle around a bonfire in front of my grandma's door. My aunt mentioned that they scared your daughter at my house or she experienced something scary, and so everyone kind of started laughing because, you know, we just we joke about it to make it feel a little less, you know, threatening, I guess that kind of broke out, like, oh, yeah, your mother's experienced a lot of stuff. And that was my first time hearing about my mom's experiences in my grandma's house. She used to experience quite a few things when she was younger. When she was in her early teens, she shared one of the rooms towards the front of the house that faces the street, that shares a wall with a neighbor. In this house, it's like tile floors, its cement walls. If there's like people moving furniture stuff around, it can echo a lot, can be kind of loud. My mom said that like clockwork, sometimes the neighbors at a specific hour of night, would you just start dragging furniture or like a crib or something heavy, some piece of furniture that was heavy, and it would wake her up. One day, she got so upset because you know, she was trying to sleep. She had school the next day. She went over and she asked the neighbor, Hey, why are you guys doing so much work in the middle of the night. The neighbors looked at her weird and they're like, what are you what are you talking about? She goes like, I hear people like moving heavy furniture around at night, and I can't sleep, and I need to sleep so I can do good in school. And the neighbor said, no, why wouldn't we be moving furniture at night. And at that point, my mom got real quiet, and she's just like, oh, well, I must have been dreaming. And she went back to my grandma's house. But it had happened so many times that she was like, it can't be a dream. I'm waking up and I'm hearing these things, and so that kind of spooked her. She talked to my grandma and she kind of just just bugged my grandma and told my grandma let her switch rooms. The way my grandma's house's format is, you know, there's those two rooms towards the front of the house. Then there's a big central courtyard, so that's open space. There's like trees and plants growing there, and then you know, around to one of the sides there's one of the sides of the courtyard there's another bedroom. So my mom switched over to that bedroom. At this point, she was actually a young mom, so she and my brother when she was sixteen almost seventeen years old. He was a baby, and so you know, it kind of made sense for her to finally get that room anyway, since she needed a little bit more space, so the crib and stuff. So her and my brother were sleeping in that room. One night, my mom, you know, woke up again because she could hear a parade of what she thinks is like horses or donkeys or you know, some big animal like she could hear hooks and a lot of foot hook just galloping for a second, and she, you know, woke up and she thought she was still in her previous bedroom where that window faces the street. She looks out the window and then she remembers, oh, no, I switched rooms. This is the window that faces the courtyard. There's nothing out there. There's no horses, no donkeys, nothing. Her blood ran cold because it was like, if it's not one room hearing you know, furniture being dragged about, it's a different room where now I'm hearing you know, preid of ghost animals that aren't there. She had already begged for this room, so she wasn't about to complain about it. So she just decided that she was going to turn on the radio and put it as high a volume as she could without waking up my older brother. She just would turn over and pretend she wasn't hearing the house. But this was a consistent thing that would happen regularly, and no one else would hear these things. My brother, you know, they got a little old. My mom decided that she was going to move to wad Arahata proper, the city proper. She moved out to this Victorian house. She was renting a room at her younger brother, my uncle, decided to move there with her. She would sleep in one room with my older brother, and then my uncle had his own room. This was an older Victorian style kind of town home where you know, like a lot of the rooms in Mexico, they're they're flat, but they're typically fenced in so that you can kind of divide the roofs with the different neighbors, and you know, you people typically like hang their laundry. My mom said that at this place, she said that she would go to sleep, she would get in bed, you know, do her routine, and as soon as she would close her eyes, she said, like it would get real quiet, and then she would hear like a dog running around on the roof, like she would hear the pitter patter of the the steps, like four legged creature. And then she says, she would hear the dog kind of come closer until it was what felt like standing on the roof right above her head. She said she would hear the like the panting, you know, the panting that a dog makes when it's been running around, and it was quite wow. It was very distinguishable. The second she heard that dog, it reminded her of the hoofs that she would hear at my grandma's house. And she's like, I know it's not there. I know it's not there. Her blood just runs cold. But you know, eventually it happens, you know, two or three times. She tells my uncle about it. My uncle says, you know, well, the next time that you hear it, you tell me and I will run up there and you know, grab whatever's running up up there. A few days later, it happens again. My mom gets up, runs to my uncle's room and she said, the dog is there. The dog is there. I hear the dog like lightning. He jumps out of bed. He grabs a little spear that he had. He runs up to the roof. He opens the door and just like my mom's suspected, there was nothing there. My uncle checked the entire parimeter of the fence to make sure that there was like no holes, that there was, you know, nothing for like a dog to be running around up there, so there was really no possibility of you know, a dog ever having been on the roof. It was like at this point in time where my mom, I think, started to become a little bit more religious. She was like, I need to find a way to keep these experiences away, like I don't like this. It kind of worked for her for a while while. She ended up moving to the States, California. Specifically, she met my dad at a dance in Watsonville, California, and they got married and we moved to this beautiful seventy eight acre state up in the Redwoods in the Los Gatos Mountains. It was a property of a very wealthy Silicon Valley tech millionaire. My dad was the groundskeeper, so we actually lived on site, which was really nice, again beautiful. We lived in the workers' home, which was it was a manufactured home and it was a pretty long house. We were kind of in this little beautiful clearing just surrounded by those wonderful redwood trees. I loved it. I had so much fun there. But you know, sometimes we would have a little bit too much fun, just running around the forest barefoot, just being kids that you know, my mom would have to kind of scare us to get back into the house at the end of the day, you know, when it was getting dark. So what she would say to get us to come back inside was Imo. Like she she had all these different like names for scary things, like Akukui is supposed to be like a demon or the devil, and Memo was this old man that she was scared of in her youth, and she just kind of brought that construct into our lives. So we were always scared of Memo, even though we had no idea who this man was. We would hear that and it's like we were just innocent kids. So like we were just having fun until she would say that, and like split second, we would be like, oh my god, no, the woods just turned scary. So we we'd run back to the house and we'd come inside. One day, she was getting ready for bed, she turned off all the lights. You know, me and my siblings were all put to bed, At this point in time, me and my sister shared a bed in one of the rooms, and her and my dad shared their own room. She had just given birth to my two brothers, who were twins, so she had them sleeping in the bed with her as well. As I mentioned, the house is like kind of long, so the kitchen is on one end of the house, and then my parents' bedroom is on the other end of the house, like at the very back, there's this very long hallway that connects everything. Her door was open because if you know, my sister and I had nightmares, we had run over to her room. Her door was always open. That's how she always preferred it. My dad, I think, was actually probably still asleep because he would put me and my sister to sleep, and sometimes you'd fall asleep in the bed next to us. So she was just you know, in bed with my two baby brothers at that point they and they had to be like less than a year old probably. She said that she gets this weird feeling like there's something in the house. She said, she feels like this almost like an energy. She's already a little bit afraid because this hasn't happened to her for a long time where she's had a weird experience. So she looks out into the hallway. It's just dark out there. There's nothing out there. If anything, there's like a dim orange glow. We had this detached garage that had this like orange light bulb, and there was really nothing else because again we're in the middle of the redwoods between a bunch of really tall trees, so there is no other source of light besides that orange glow. She feels like like there's just something in that darkness that's making her uncomfortable, and she doesn't know quite what. Out of nowhere, she feels almost like a presence, she says. She feels it just kind of like getting closer and closer was it was coming fast. She feels this heavy dark pressure that jumps into the bed and it kind of envelops her body. It's almost like a sleep process, but she's fully awake. She's fully awake in that moment. She's like, you know what, I already know how to deal with this. This is the devil, Like I am crying out to God. So she says, you know, like I know who you are, and you're not welcome here. Just get out of my house. And she has to repeat it a few times. She says she finally like feels like she can exhale, and so she exhales, and whatever that heaviness was, that darkness was, it jumps kind of out the window that's parallel to her bed. She said that after that point, finally she's breathing and she's like sweating a little. She's terrified, and she's just like looking at my two baby brothers next to her, and she's like, I can't, I can't do this. She at that point was when she started really looking to get more heavily involved with Christianity or the church, or just become a little bit more religious, because she'd had enough of these experiences. She wanted to find some kind of protection. After that, she never mentioned Akukui or Memo or La Mano Pelula. Ever. She said that she thinks she like almost manifested it by trying to scare us so often, and she said she was never going to do that to us again because she didn't want to go through that again. Things are pretty quiet for a while after that. We end up moving out of that worker's home and we moved to the city of Salinas. California. It was a bunch of new constructions and it was towards the newer edge of town. There was a lot of like agricultural fields around. It's just like a very newly developed area at the time. We never really experienced anything in that house up until the point that I had to be around eight or nine years old, so this is probably in like twenty ten. A few of our neighbors down the street they moved out and they did like this big clean out. My parents were very much so like nature is your playground. You don't need any anything else. So we never really had a bunch of like TV or video games or board games or anything like that. So when we saw a bunch of board games on the curb, we were all super excited. We ran over and we picked up all the board games. It's like Monopoly or sorry, and so we brought all of the boxes into the house. I'm like looking at the different board games, and I look at one and I'm like, outijya, what is that word? I don't know what that word is. I'd heard the word wiji, but I'd never seen it spelled out. But it takes me a moment and I was like oh, oh, oh, I think this is a wija board. At this point, we'd started going to church pretty consistently. We knew that we don't mess with this kind of stuff like that. That was something that was very explicit, So we didn't even open the board game at all. We just grabbed it once I figured out what it was, and I ran back outside and I threw it in the trash. That was that. We played with some of the other board games, and then after that that was kind of when the first family experience happened. The entrance to our house, there's kind of like this little alcove right next to it. There's like a little dip where if we're sitting in the living room we can't see the actual door itself. It was the evening, you know, it was dark out. I'd already locked the door for the evening because you know, something about Selina's California is you don't leave your door is unlocked. So we immediately closed and locked that door. We're sitting and we my mom had finally bought a TV and we were watching you know, like a nature documentary as a family in the living room. You know, I'm sitting kind of with my back to where the door is. All of a sudden, the door flies open and it hits this little desk that we had in that little alcove next to it. My older brother he didn't live with us at the time anymore, so I thought, well, it's just my brother, you know, he's coming in. We probably threw the door open because you stuff in his hands. The family was distracted, we were watching the show, and so we all kind of just like didn't pay it any attention. But then after a moment, I was like, why is no one coming inside? So I look at everybody else, and so I get up and I turned the corner right there to look at the door itself. There's no one there. Honestly, like I didn't think too much of it at the time. I was just pretty confused. I go and I shut it and I locked the door, and I was like, well, that's weird. We're now pretty relicious at this point. We're sitting upstairs in my mom's room because at the end of the day we would all go to my parents' room, socialize a little bit, get our sillies out by the end of the night, and then we would read the Bible, you know, pray, do stuff like that, and it was like a nightly ritual for us. We would do that every night. Two or three weeks goes by and we're all sitting on my parents' bed, just chit chatting. We're reading a Bible verse. I don't recall what that for pivol verse was at all. It was one that I'd been rehearsing for church, but I still to this day can't remember it because that, you know, that was the first like real experience where we all just kind of froze as a family. You know, We're sitting there downstairs, is empty, it's lonely, it's dark, it's quiet, and then out of nowhere, we hear loud static. We all kind of jump a little bit because it's it's loud. We all kind of look at each other. It's like, what's going on. And so my baby sister, the youngest of the crew, she's the only one who's like not really heard any of the family scary stories. She's still till innocent, so she doesn't really think much of it. She gets up and she goes look over or the little banister that's kind of guarding the upstairs hallway from the downstairs because it's a high vaulted ceiling, so we can look over into the living room into the dining room. And so she goes, oh, the TV turned on, and I was already like no, please, My mom says, okay, go go turn and go turn off the TV. I you're the oldest, go turn it off. You know. I took my baby sister with me. I made her go with me, because you know, there's something about her innocence and her calmness that just gave me the tranquility to go down there just long enough, like could turned the TV back off. Now, the issue with this TV, it's it's a very old TV. So all of the little buttons to like turn the TV on, to turn it off, to change the channels, they're all busted in. What I had to do was I had to get this pencil and poke around in that little like punched in hole on the TV until I found the little clicker to turn the TV back off. And the entire time, the TV is just on static blaring like that static noise, super loudly, and it's terrifying, right because the rest of the living room is just dark and quiet. We finally get the TV to turn off, we run back upstairs because yeah, it's scary. We get back in bed and we just kind of sit there in silence for a moment, and then we just kind of continue on like it didn't happen. Unfortunately, it would become a regular occurrence. Every time that TV would turn onto static at full volume. For some reason, we were always at my parents' bed either praying or reading a Bible verse or just you know, have a good time chatting as a family. You know, it kind of became a joke where, you know, it's like, oh, like we paused every time we were about to start reading the Bible or praying because they're like, just in case the TV decides to turn on again. It was a little scary for us as kids, but you know, we kind of learned to laugh about it a little bit, and then they started to escalate a little bit. There was this one time we were all kind of sitting downstairs the afternoon, you know, watching another one of those nature documentaries on PBS. It's like the one thing my parents let us watch upstairs. There's like this little hallway between my parents' master bedroom and in our two bedrooms is that we all shared there's this little shelving area where we always put the bibles. Out of nowhere, the bibles fly off the shelves. We all look up and we look at each other again confused, like we all heard that, right, And so Mom say go upstairs. It's always me. I'm the oldest of that group. So I go, and I'm like, well, it's clear, what's what's happened? Like the bibles are all off the shelf, so I have to go and put them back on the shelf. After that, it was just like a slow trickles of just things that were weird. My baby sister, the youngest, the one who you know previously had never really you know, shared any fears or anything like that. She wasn't, you know, like super scared of anything. So you would start having nightmares. The girl shared one bedroom, the boys shared their own bedroom. I'd be sleep in my bed as the eldest one. Always fell asleep a little bit later than everybody else. Every time I would hear my baby sister, she would start to whimper in her sleep. She would start to cry in her sleep. It's a little girl crying, you know. She's probably about four or five at the time. It's scary, and she starts at one point like wailing. I remember, this would get so scary that me and my other sister, we would be frozen in our beds, like we would be too scared to poker to wake her up, because the sounds she would make are just so blood curdling that, you know, eventually my mom would hear her and then come into the room and wake her up. She also started to sleep walk. Sometimes she would go downstairs. Sometimes she would, you know, you just like stand in the middle of the room. There's one time that I woke up from a nightmare and I see her silhouette, just like the shadow of her, standing staring at me in my sleep. I had just opened my eyes from a nightmare, so, you know, like my instinct, unfortunately, was to you know, I swung on her because I was so scared. I didn't know what was going on. I just see a figure standing in front of my bed, and I punch her in the face. Unfortunately, she stumbles back, she doesn't fall, but she stays quiet the whole time. She doesn't make a sound. When I hit her, my heart was beating out of my chest, and so I'm just staring at her, like not knowing what she's gonna do. I realized it was my sister, and she just turns around and she goes into the bathroom. So we had this adjoining bathroom. It was kind of like a Jack and Joel bathroom where my brothers had a door that went to the bathroom. We had a door that went to the bathroom and that led to the seating area, and then there's another door pass there that led to the toilet in the shower. What she ended up doing was she went into that little middle section with all the doors closed around her. So the toilet and shower door was closed, my brother's room door was closed, and then our room door was closed, and she just started crying in there, and it eventually got so loud that my mom came into the room and eventually put her back to bed. But I just remember like being so scared every night that she was going to do that again. I started having trouble sleeping. I would get really anxious at night, and I sometimes would have to stay up until I could see the sun coming up, you know, like the sky would start to lighten, and then I would finally feel safe enough to close my eyes. That lasted from the age of I think I was twelve until I was like fifteen, and then it kind of dissipated. I remember one night I was again up a little later than in most of my other siblings. I here in my brother's room a giant thought, and then I hear running, and I was just like, huh, I wonder what that was about. But I just, you know, I assume maybe like my brother had a bad dream or something ran to my parents room. So I go to sleep, and the next day, my mom actually calls like a family meeting, so we're all sitting at her bed again. My brother he's terrified. He looks terrified. My mom tells us that the previous night, my brother had been having a nightmare and then he opened his eyes, and when he opened his eyes, you know, he woke up. He realized that the scary voice that he was hearing in his dream was still talking. They had bunk beds and he was sleeping on the top bunk, and so he said that he could feel like there was almost something standing next to him where the ladder is to go up to the bed, and he was so scared to look that he was like frozen solid and he said he felt his face just get so hot. He was probably six or seven at this time, and you couldn't really understand what the voice was saying because he was too scared to really process any of the words. He said. Eventually, like the voice just stopped and the feeling of someone being there went away. The second he felt that ability to like finally move his body, he didn't even take the ladder down. He just threw himself over the side of the top bunk fell on the floor. And that's what I had, the thud that I had heard that night, and he ran to my parents room. He told my mom about it. My mom, yeah, you know, She's like, oh, he just had hairs, it's fine. So she just let him sleep with her. She didn't really believe him. She just thought it was a bad dream. And she said that she was like asleep herself. It was probably around four or five in the morning. She was about to like, you know, get up out of bed. Her eyes were still closed, and she was like, Okay, I gotta get ready for the day. Right as she's about to like really shake herself awake to get up out of bed, she says she hears a deep kind of a buttteral voice in her ear. She said that the voice only said like two words, and she didn't understand them either, But she just like jomped awake at that point and she looked over to her side and there was nothing there. That's when she believed my brother that he'd heard something. But she didn't tell us about her kind of hearing. She just like was like the next day, she was like, you know, I didn't believe him. I heard it too. Whatever it was was really tormenting my brother the most, and so she, you know, brought in people to bless the house. She brought in people to pray over my brother, to bless my brother, to just make sure that he was doing okay, because he had a hard time sleeping after that, and I think he started kind of having some emotional problems after that, just you know, he was pretty young when it started. Eventually, we did move out of that house. We moved from California to Oregon. Moving to Oregon, things got a lot better, at least for the rest of the family. Sisters, my parents, and I. We didn't experience anything in the new houses. You know, we were you know, we didn't have any of that scary like TV turning on stuff at all. But I think my brother to like this day sometimes he just like he struggles a little bit. I wish we could talk about a little bit more, but my parents are like, no, let's not trigger that, let's just keep it at bay. When whenever we talk about it, it's kind of like we try to laugh at it again as per usual. I think that's like a common thing with Latino families, like we try to laugh it off and just make it, you know, a funny story to tell so we can kind of process that trauma a little bit. I think being a Christian like it definitely was a lot more of like a taboo, like we don't want to encour achieve these things, but we do want to acknowledge that they're there. So my family was always in this like interesting balance of like we talk about it in the sense that like we want to acknowledge that, you know, the devil exists and there's bad things in the world, and you know God is the one who could save you from all that, so stay close to God's kind of how we would talk about it, but we tried not to talk about it too much, Like I guess in the sense we kind of felt as a family if we talk about it more, if we give it too much attention, like it'll keep going or it'll get worse. Is it psychological? Is it like a manifestation thing? Is it, you know, like energies that just you know, compound and build on each other to create something negative. Because of the experiences that we had as a family, and I've had myself, like, I feel like there is kind of a supernatural side of things. You know. I don't necessarily know what it is. I just, you know, based on my experiences, feel like there is some kind of different level to our world that we don't really understand at all. Stay up to date with our free newsletter. The link is in our website and in the description. This episode of True Scary Story was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, a VW sound If you're following the show, we'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, Let's see you soon.