Farmhouse Nightmares

[00:00:00] Some memories never fade. She was just a child when it happened, alone in the dark, unable to move. She heard it, and she knew she was not alone. My name is Edwin, and here is Liz's true scary story.

[00:00:17] My name is Liz. This situation happened 1976. I was eight. My older sister was ten. Back then, my parents divorced, so we had to go into the foster care system.

[00:00:46] The night that we left, we had to go to what they call an emergency shelter home. We grew up in the city, so here we are driving like maybe an hour and a half, two hours, and it's all farmland. It was dark. You've got one house, another house, you won't see it for another couple miles.

[00:01:16] That's where Mr. and Mrs. Moore lived. They lived in a farmhouse. It looked very scary the night we got there, of course. But as the days and weeks and months went by, we actually really enjoyed ourselves there.

[00:01:42] During the day, it was nice because they had horses, and they had chickens, and we played outside. Every night, Mrs. Moore would say goodnight to us, and then she would close her bedroom door, and she would go to her room. At the time that this happened, it was myself, my sister, a young girl, and her brother.

[00:02:09] The three of us girls shared a big bedroom, and the young boy was in another room. So it was a two-story farmhouse, and you go up the steps. Straight ahead was her room. So you open the door, and to the right is where the young girl would sleep.

[00:02:30] Then to the left would be my bed to the left and my sister's bed on the right with a window in the middle against that wall. That night, I don't know why. I felt just unease. I couldn't sleep. And when I think about it now, I think, did I sense something?

[00:03:00] My head is turned to the right with my left ear exposed, meaning I didn't have the sheets over my face or anything. I couldn't sleep, but I had my eyes closed.

[00:03:19] And then all of a sudden, I see this shadow that looked to be of a man come in the room, come straight, and then turn left. Coming either to my sister's side or my side. I can see that, but yet my eyes are closed, and I know I was not sleeping. I couldn't scream.

[00:03:48] I couldn't cry. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't move. I was frozen. But I could just see it coming. It started to, like, hover down over me. Now, this shadow was darker than dark. Like I said, there was a window. The moon was out. And you still couldn't see the shadow. And he was tall, very tall.

[00:04:18] So he hovers over me. And he starts to get closer and closer. And then he starts whistling in my left ear. And each time he whistled, I could feel him getting closer. And then he touched me. When he touched me, which felt cold, I woke up.

[00:04:49] It was like I was in this trance. And then I woke up. And I started screaming. And I was crying. Mrs. Moore comes in, turns on the light. And she says, she says, what the devil's going on here? I said, there is a man here. He whistled in my ear and he touched me. There is a man here. I just kept repeating it, repeating it. She thought it was nonsense. She didn't believe me.

[00:05:20] My sister and the other girl, just kind of like their eyes were kind of big. Like, wow, you know, what's going on? She said, now go to bed. You know, like enough of this nonsense. And she said, and who opened the door? And I said, she did. He opened the door. Still, she didn't believe me. So she closed the door and she went back in her room. Of course, she turned off the light.

[00:05:46] And my sister says to me, Liz, she says, I believe you. Because I think it came to me first. I'm crying and I'm wiping the tears off my eyes. And I said, well, why didn't you say something? And she said, well, I didn't think anybody was going to believe me. She tells me that she sees the shadow.

[00:06:13] And she too said it looked like a man, a very tall man. It's coming towards her, which is weird because I can see it coming towards me. And she said she was holding on to her sheets and she wanted to cover her face because it was starting to hover down over her. She said it took everything she had to put the sheets over her head, over her face.

[00:06:41] And she said when she did that, what woke her up was me crying and screaming. I never saw it again. But other things have happened. It just was not the shadow man.

[00:06:59] My first encounter with what I may call the paranormal happened probably a year before my parents separated. I was home alone with my baby sister. My dad was working. My mom was working at night from time to time.

[00:07:27] She cleaned offices at night. And I remember her taking my older sister with her. Now, nowadays, you're going, okay, wait, you know, she's like seven years old. No one leaves her seven-year-old like that. But back then in the 70s, anything happened. We were in this apartment. And just to kind of give you a visual, there was a living room. Then there was a small little dining. And right across from it was a kitchen.

[00:07:57] And then straight ahead to the left was my parents' bedroom. And then down the hall was our bedroom. And the three of us shared it. That night, I'm sitting in the living room. The couch was on one side of the wall. And I was watching TV kind of like sideways sitting on that couch. And my sister was on the floor. She was playing.

[00:08:23] I think I might have had like a blanket on the carpet for her. I needed to get her a diaper. I got up. And I went straight down the hallway into our room. Opened the door. And as soon as I opened the door, to the right of that room is our closet.

[00:08:51] And when I opened the door and turned on the light, that closet door was like shaking. It was like trembling. Like, grrr. And I'm looking at it. I'm scared, of course. You know, I'm seven years old. I'm scared. And I quickly go straight to my sister's crib, grab a diaper, close the door. Didn't turn off the light. Nothing. And I just closed the door and I ran back in the living room. Of course, I'm starting to cry a little.

[00:09:20] I changed her diaper. And I'm sitting there. And I can recall watching the Sonny and Cher show. And I'm sitting there watching that and trying not to think about what I just saw. Just praying that my mom would hurry up and come home. As I'm sitting on this couch, I'm on each side of the couch with one end table and one side end table and the other side.

[00:09:50] All of a sudden, to the right on that table. And I looked at it like, what was that? Then all of a sudden, to the left, the end table on the left side of the couch, it knocks again. And I'm like freaking out by then, knowing that something is wrong here.

[00:10:19] And all of a sudden, it starts knocking underneath the couch. I jumped off. And I got on the floor, started tearing, but I don't think I was crying like out loud because I didn't want to scare my baby sister. When my mom finally comes home with my older sister, soon as she opens the door, I run to

[00:10:47] her and I'm crying. And she's saying to me in Spanish, she's saying, which is, honey, what's wrong? I started telling her the closet door in the bedroom was shaking. This table was knocking. And then it knocked again on this table. And then it knocked under the sofa. I guess because we're Hispanic and we have that background of beliefs in the paranormal and

[00:11:17] all these other things. And the thing she asks is, how many knocks? And I'm looking at her and I'm like, three. Three. Three on this table, three on that table, and three under the couch. And then she proceeds to tell me, which now when you think about it, it's like, okay, why would you tell me that mom at like seven years old? And she said, well, that's the devil.

[00:11:46] Thinking back on that with knowledge I have of some things, that's mocking the Holy Trinity. So, you know, when you're seven years old, you're not going to make up a story of three knocks each. And that was the first time that an encounter of, for me, I call it evil. I've had many evil encounters, but I've had other types of paranormal encounters,

[00:12:15] just maybe not necessarily all bad. That one, though, was bad. The next story would be when we left Mr. and Mrs. Moore's house and found like a permanent foster home.

[00:12:45] We actually stayed the most with Mrs. Moore's best friend, Mrs. Clark. She was a widow. Her husband was the local pastor who had passed away a long time ago. We came to love her and her huge family. I mean, she had like seven grandkids, grown kids. And she did open her home to other foster kids, not just me and my sister. And my sister, again, is my older sister.

[00:13:15] My younger sister stayed with my mom. I think we may have had a Fourth of July party. We had to walk down this road, very dark road. Again, it's that same road. It's dark. It's farmland. And we were walking. Maybe there was about maybe 10 of us towards what I call like a fork in the road. Because half of those kids lived on the other side of that road.

[00:13:45] And in this fork of the road is actually is where our church was, our Baptist church. And there was a graveyard next to it. And these other kids that needed to go to the other side of the road, all they had to do was just kind of like walk in the grass of the church to go to the other side. So they did that. The rest of us stayed on our side. You know, we said our goodbyes.

[00:14:12] And then all of a sudden, someone said, look, what is that? We all looked. And he was pointing at the sign where it has like the church services. But it was a pretty big sign because it was a lot of there was still a lot of room for it just being like concrete. The sign did not cover all of that. But he was pointing at that.

[00:14:39] As soon as I looked and my sister looked, and I can only speak for the two of us, we saw this shadow. The shadow got bigger. And then it opened up what I call like wings. But we saw these two red eyes.

[00:15:07] We all screamed and we just, we just walked. We just ran. The kids on the other side of the road were running to their house. We were running back to our house. We went home and we told Mrs. Clark and everyone that was still there. Of course, they didn't believe us. And I never saw it again. But I'd never walk at night there again either.

[00:15:31] What I think we saw may have been Mothman. This was Poolsville, Maryland. The Mothman came out of West Virginia. And I'm not too far from West Virginia here. It is possible that this thing travels.

[00:15:53] And now when I think about it, and I hear the story of Mothman, like the real stories, I think, well, maybe that is what I saw that night. Fast forward, I'm about 12 years old. We are back with my mom. So it's the four of us. My mom, my older sister, myself, and my younger sister. And we are living in a townhouse.

[00:16:24] These were brand new townhouses. I don't know when this started. But I can tell you by the time I was 12 years old, I was trying to debunk anything that I've heard or seen or happened. Or my sister says, hey, this happened. Or my mom says something. I'm like, no, I refuse to believe this. I'm not going down that rabbit hole again. Until it happened to me.

[00:16:51] A few things that had happened, for example, to my mom, and I didn't know this until years later. In the townhouse, there's two floors. You walk in, there's a dining room, and there's a kitchen, a little hallway, living room. You go up, steps turn right. And to the left, there's two bedrooms. To the right, there's a bigger bedroom that was my mom's bedroom. And there was a shared bathroom that had two doors. You know what I mean?

[00:17:20] You can go in from either way. My mom told us years later that one night she was reading her Bible. I get the feeling she was having things happen to her. They always did, but I think things were still happening to her at that time. And she started reading the Bible more frequently. That one night she said her bed shook. I mean, it shook.

[00:17:49] That happened to her in that bedroom. Now, years later, we all kind of switched bedrooms. And the two of us already shared that big bedroom. One day, my younger sister was with her best friend in our bedroom. And they were playing and stuff. And then all of a sudden, they're hearing sounds coming out of our closet.

[00:18:15] Things kind of like moving, a belt moving that was hung up, you know, wasn't like on the floor or anything like that. They ran downstairs and said there's something in the closet. And I was like the debunker. I'm like, no, there isn't. I went upstairs. I opened the closet door. I see my belt hanging and, you know, see nothing. I said, it's all good. I ignored that.

[00:18:40] One time, the three of us went to my younger sister's best friend's house. Her parents weren't there, but we went over and we, like, watched a movie, ate popcorn and things like that. Now, Heather had a dog. So the dog was with us. We're sitting in a game room. And it was near the kitchen. But you couldn't see the kitchen from where we were sitting.

[00:19:12] I remember that when we came in and went in the kitchen, there was, like, the local newspaper on the kitchen counter. So we're sitting in the living room, you know, mind our own business, doing our thing. And then all of a sudden you can hear, like, a sound of... What sounded to all of us was someone picked up the newspaper and threw it on the floor. The dog looked and started barking.

[00:19:44] My sister's best friend wasn't like, oh, you know, paranormal or whatever. Of course, we didn't call it that back then. We did. We figured, okay, something's not right here. Is it following us from our house? Going back to our townhouse, I remember the one time I was in my bedroom. And my room was always very cold. Very cold. I had closed the door.

[00:20:14] And I was doing my algebra homework. A few minutes later, my mom comes up. And she tells me to leave the door open because the room is so cold to let the heat circulate and stuff. So it would heat up my room. So she goes downstairs. She's downstairs with her boyfriend and my two sisters. I'm the only one upstairs. I'm on my bed, sitting on my bed, looking at my book.

[00:20:40] And I can see that my door shut, but it didn't clasp or anything. It just came close to closing, but it didn't. But it moved so quickly. It just went, and I looked up and I was like, okay. My sisters are pranking me here. So I ignored it, finished my homework.

[00:21:07] I went downstairs, watched TV with the rest of the family. And I said, okay, by the way, I said, which one of you tried to close my door? And they're like, what are you talking about? I said, mom told me to leave the door open. She left it open and I did. I said, I could see that my door went to shut, but not all the way. Real close, though.

[00:21:32] Like, I would have seen someone's hand on the doorknob if they were trying to close the door. I didn't see anything. And they're like, ah, Liz, I don't know what you're talking about. None of us were up there. And I looked at my mom, because I know she wouldn't have lied. She wouldn't lie. And I looked at her boyfriend, and he was like, nope, nobody was up there. Now, when this happened, I no longer could ignore it.

[00:21:59] One Saturday morning, I was by myself at the house. By then, both my sisters had heard things upstairs, like walking. I refused to believe it. That morning, I'm in the living room, I'm watching TV, and all of a sudden, I can hear footsteps upstairs. They're pacing back and forth, back and forth.

[00:22:31] I ignored it. Well, then it got louder. And I could hear it kind of paced from, like, that bathroom where there's two entrances. It was going from the hallway to the bathroom to my mom's bedroom, back to the bathroom, back to the hallway. And I finally put the TV on pause. It would stop every time I would pause. I put the volume back on. And then this time, I put the volume even louder.

[00:23:03] The footsteps got louder. You know, louder than the volume on the TV. As if it wanted me to hear it. So I put pause again. I did that maybe about three times. By the fourth time, I got really mad. And I got up. And I went to the hallway. Turned around to the bottom of the steps. And looked up to the steps at the top. And I said, okay, I've had enough.

[00:23:32] I said, if you're here, then show yourself. I can hear the steps creaking. And I can hear each step that was being made. There was the creaking sound. But you could hear like there were footsteps. By the time it came down like halfway, I was scared.

[00:24:02] I ran outside of the house and sat on the corner of my house, waiting for my mom and my sisters to come home. And when they came home, I told them. My sisters are like, see, we told you. We told you. There's something here. There's something here. I believed them. After that, fast forward, my older cousin, actually his name's Edwin.

[00:24:30] He always liked coming over and hanging out with us and his aunt, my mom. If I was 12, Edwin may have been, I don't know, a junior in high school maybe. He came over our house and he stayed there. We went out. When we came home, it was nighttime. The lights all over the house were on. You could see it from the outside. You could see the kitchen light. You could see the hallway light.

[00:24:59] And we saw the lights and we're like, why does Edwin have all the lights on? And then we kind of like looked at each other, not my mom, but us sisters. And we're like, I bet something happened. So as soon as we come up the steps outside, he opens the door and he's holding a bat. And he says to my mom in Spanish, Tia, tienes algo aquí?

[00:25:29] He says, you have something here. There's something here. It keeps walking. We're like, yep. Okay, that definitely confirms there's something there. We even had our neighbor two doors down. He came over one night. He was there by himself. We had gone out. And when we came home, Butch tells my mom, and we're standing there, we can hear him.

[00:25:59] He says, there's something in this house. He proceeds to say that, you know, he's hearing footsteps. When you're talking me, my two sisters, my cousin, and our neighbor, that's five people that have heard things in that house. So, I mean, at some point we all moved, you know, we got older and we moved and all that.

[00:26:27] And I was glad to get out of that house. That house really creeped me out, but it was a brand new house, a townhouse. I find out later that my mom had seeked some help. I'm not sure whether it was what I call some sort of voodoo person, some sort of witch person. I don't know, but something like that.

[00:26:50] What she was told was it was her, that something was following her. You know, at that time, I believed it, and I got mad. I'm like, it's your fault. You know, it's following us. But quite honestly, you know, like I said, I'm 56 years old, and I still have things that happen. Not to that degree, but things that you're thinking, okay, well, did I just hear my son's voice? Or did I hear someone just call me?

[00:27:20] That sort of thing. But not every situation of the paranormal is bad. There's good things and there's bad things. If there's a story that you want to share with the rest of us, head on over to truescarystory.com and fill out the form. To not miss out on the next week's story, make sure you're following the show.

[00:27:50] Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.