The Figure Under the Streetlight

In the middle of the night. They just ran out of the house. They didn't even take their stuff, they left everything. They just ran out of the house and they never came back. A mysterious figure under a street light, footsteps in an empty room, and a growl in the darkness are only the beginning of Tonight's unsettling account. My name is Edwin, and here's towards true scary story. I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. From the age of five years old. I lived with my mom and my dad in this old house. I think this house was like one hundred and fifty years old. My whole life growing up, I would hear what I thought was my mom calling my I'd go down to the stairs and I'd say, Mom, what did you need? And she would tell me I didn't call for you, honey. I didn't say anything. One of my first experiences that I remember, I had just gotten a new phone and I had set up my voicemail. Now I don't know why I did this, I'm a weird kid, but in the middle of recording my voicemail, I went to the next room next to me to pretend that I was doing something I don't know, kids are weird. And when I come back out after recording my voicemail, I listened to it over and when it came to the part where I left the room, I could hear voices. It sounded really gurgly and just ron. I went and visited my friend later and I showed her like, hey, look at this voicemail. Do you hear that? And she goes, oh my god, you have demons following you. Another time, I had my one of my best friends come over and we were just hanging out, having a slumber party. We were in my room playing. All of a sudden, we both look over and see this hand pop out of my wall. I remember it distinctly because the sleeve was all ruffled, and I was like, did you see that? She's like, yeah, I did. We just kind of rushed it off. We went back to playing. I have windows that are right next to my bed, and we were just about to lay down for a bed I happened to look out, and I have a fenced in yard and then I have a street light right next to it. I saw somebody standing right next to that street lamp, just like looking towards my house, towards my window. I freak out. I'm like, do you see that person? Like that has to be a person, right, and she goes, yeah, I see that too. I'm thinking that this person can see me, so I lay back down. I'm laying down because I'm like trying to hide from his view. I'm like freaked out. And then I get back up, like a few minutes later to see if it's still there, and it's gone. As a kid, when I was living at this house, I had this cat. His name was little Harley. Little Harley had to be put down, and I was sad. And so the first night I slept without him, I had to have like twelve stuffed animals on my bed with me, and I just remember how sad I was. At some point in the night, I remember feeling something jumped on the bed and walked up to me. I sat up, I was like Harley. I didn't open my eyes because I was afraid of what I might see. I don't know, I was a kid, but I felt like a tail brush across my face and I felt him laying down by me. I felt good about that, and so I laid back down and I went to bed. A couple of years later, my dad ended up passing away. I was like sixteen and we had to move. But for like the first month before we moved, we had to stay in that house. I just remember how cold it got. It got really really cold. My mom would even notice. She'd be like, Tori, do you notice how cold it got in here? And I'm like, yeah, I do. We ended up moving out and moved in with my uncle and everything was fine. And then I met my ex when I was eighteen, and then I moved down to Missouri. So this is where stuff starts getting really creepy. I moved down to this house with him, and right when I pulled up to the house, I had this feeling that it was off. Like I got out of the car and I looked at it and it just looked off. A few days go by, everything was normal. It was right outside middle of the day. I'm sitting there and I think I was one of the only people in the house. I don't know if my stepdaughter was there or my ex, but I just remember I was in the living room by myself and I'm watching TV. There were two doors in the living room that led to the outside, and one of the doors I saw it on my proofree vision. I saw this man in a dressed in a blue shirt walk by, and I was like, what is somebody here? I get up and I go look, but there's nobody there. So that kind of freaked me out, but I tried to brush it off. This one night in particular, everybody is asleep. It's in the middle of the night. I wake up for some reason and I start hearing what sounds like people yelling outside my window. So I'm thinking the neighbors are fighting. So I get up and I move the curtain and I'm like, what is that like when people are trying to sleep. I don't see anybody. I just brush it off, you know. I go and I lay back down, and then I hear it again. I move the curtain more and I really try to get a good look because maybe I just didn't see them at first. I still don't see anybody, so I just figured I'm just going to ignore this and go back to sleep. A few minutes past and I start hearing what sounds like footsteps coming across the carpet. Now I have carpet, so I don't know how I heard this, but I heard footsteps coming from the living room into our room and then I start hearing growling. My heart starts racing. I'm like, what is going on. I'm a big believer that if you experience anything with a paranormal you just ignore it, don't even acknowledge it, because that feeds into it and that gives it power. So I didn't do anything. I'm still turned over, my eyes are still closed, and then I feel a hand touched my shoulder. Again, I just ignore it. I start praying. I'm like, please watch over me, please protect me, Please, whatever is in this house, get it out. I don't want this around me. I'm just trying to sleep. It eventually goes away and I'm fine. Another night, it's in the middle of the night again, I turn over to like readjust how I'm sleeping, and I turn over and I look. I see this person standing in front of my ex This hair is all scraggling. It's pitch black. Now, this room is already dark, but this figure was pitch black and it had scraggly, curly hair all around its head, and it just was like staring at him. I tried to open my eyes further to see what is this, and it just disappears. My stepdaughter would be playing in her room with her friend. Her and her friend for some reason, was playing in her closet, but her closet it locked on her and it kept her inside. I'm in the living room and I'm watching TV and I start hearing the kids screaming. I'm thinking they're just playing, but it just keeps getting louder and I go and I open the door and they're like, we were locked inside. I'm like, what, you couldn't get out? And they were explaining to me how they were playing in the closet and the door slams on them and they couldn't open the door. I was really freaked out. She was really freaked out about that. I would go into the kitchen sometimes and there would be orbs. I would see orbs flying around. There was this one time in the middle of that night, I had to go to the kitchen for something I can't remember. I go into the kitchen and I see this orb flying around the ceiling light. It was white. It was like a small, white, little circle orb. It was weird because like, I've never seen anything like that before. And I go in there and it's just flying around and it disappears once it notices that I'm looking, but I just thought that was really weird because I've never seen anything like that. I would experience these dreams. I would be laying there still, and all of a sudden, I would feel these hands go around my neck and start choking me. I would feel myself thrashing, like trying to claw and punch at anything, at what whatever it was that was holding me holding my neck because I was like freaking out. But at the same time, I was still laying there still. And I have never met anybody or heard anybody have that same kind of dream. And it's like I'm fighting back. I can feel my body like fighting back, trying to get these hands away from me, but yet my body is still laying still. One time, I'm taking a shower. It's in the middle of the day. I think I'm washing my hair, and all of a sudden, I look over and I see a little kid hand brush across like the shadow of a hand brush across the shower curtain. So I moved the shower curtain, thinking that somebody was there, but nobody was there. I would come home from work a lot of the times and I would smell sulfur or an old, old woman's perfume. I wasn't wearing perfume back then, so it was really odd to us all that it smelled like that old perfume. One night, I send my stepdaughter to bed and ad This is after we got into an argument. But I send her to bed, and I'm in the kitchen. I'm still cleaning up or doing whatnot, and out of the corner of my eye, I see what looks to be her standing in the doorway, in the same pajamas, same hair, same everything. It looked like her, but her hair was like half in her face, and it looks like she's looking down at me, like her face was like half tilted down, and she had like this angry look about her. And I look like directly at where she was, and it wasn't there. It was gone. Fast forward a couple of years, it's twenty fifteen. We move it to this house ten miles into the country. My sister comes down from Tennessee to come help, because at this time I had just had my daughter. So she comes and you know, she tries to help. So we're all staying in this house. Now. This house, it was a double wine mobile home. It was really nice. My sister had gotten me these new slippers, and I really liked them, you know, I wore them the whole night because I love them so much. And then it comes to bedtime. Everybody's in bed. It's in the middle of the night. All of a sudden, I hear this huge, like a gunshot in the next room, the living room. I shoot up out of my spot because I'm like, what the heck was that. I look around. My ex is still fast asleep, and nobody else is awake, so I'm the only one who woke up and heard it. And then a few minutes go by and I start hearing what sounds like my slippers shuffling across the floor from the kitchen all the way through the living room into the doorway. It stopped at my doorway to my bedroom. All of a sudden, it makes this really high pitched screeching sound. And I'm telling you, I have never heard any sound like this before, but it sounded all high p screeching. I don't know why I did this, but in my head, I start praying again and I start saying to the entity, to whoever is there, I said, in my head instead of out loud, you need to get out of this house. If you do not leave this house, I am going to grab my Bible and I'll make you leave. Luckily, thank the Lord, it did end up leaving and I never experienced anything else at that house. Fast forward again a couple of years, we had to move up to Iowa. In Burlington, there was this three story brick house on twelfth Street. When we first arrived here, it was supposed to be my ex, my other sister Brittany, and then my stepdaughter and my daughter, Lucybeth. The landlord shows us around this house because he just wanted us to get a feel of the place before these other tenants move out and we take the house. Now, the other tenant was still there, but it was only that one person. Apparently there was a whole bunch of other people staying there with him. So the first thing that struck me as odd. If you walk into the living room, you have the living room on the left, and then you have this big staircase that goes upstairs to like right in front of you, and then a hallway that goes all the way to the kitchen. I had the staircase that leads upstairs, but I noticed to the left where the living room is. What I thought was odd was there was like three or four couches, like that's where they all slept on. We go upstairs, we're looking in all the bedrooms. He's showing us around. The first thing I noticed is there are symbols scratched into the doorframe of these doors, Like the door to the bedroom, there's symbols etched on the doorframe. And I thought that was odd because I have never ever seen anything like that. It reminded me of something that would ward off these different spirits. I'm not sure I've never seen anything like it, but for some reason, we never did ask anybody. I don't know why I didn't. But then we get to the bedroom that was going to be ours. There was this burned spot in the middle of the floor where my bed was going to be. Eventually, I noticed that the closet, this was the only closet in the whole house that was painted like a blood red and the whole closet was painted like that. I thought that was a little weird because you got the burned spot on the floor and then the closet is painted this color. After he shows us around the house, we're sitting outside, and I happened to look back and the tenant who currently was staying there, he was staring out the door at us in this like deadpan, blank face. It just gave me this off feeling. We ended up moving in. Everything was okay for the first night or two. There's this little area in the hallway to the right where our toolbox is and where you could put like maybe a desk or whatever there. It's just like this little cut out area from the hallway. And then my ex tells me that he was standing there one night and doing whatever he was doing, and he saw like the shadow walk past him. Obviously there's nobody there. I would see faces whenever I would walk throughout the house. One time, I'm coming upstairs and I see this face pop around from the corner, and I'll never forget this face. It looked all like he was baring his teeth. It was like this distorted face with weird eyes and scrunched up like he was like sneering at me. One day, I'm downstairs in the living room with my stepdaughter. My ex leaves to go do something and it's just her and I in the house. As soon as he walks out the door. We hear a woman screaming from upstairs. We both stop what we're doing and we're both looking at each other like, uh my stepdaughter, She goes, did you hear that? And I'm like, I did, but we're just gonna ignore it. And that's literally what I did. I just went back to what I was doing, and that was that. Another night, I was coming home from the store from down the street, I could see this big wood fence that surrounds our house. I saw what looked like a huge black figure that was like peeking its head above the fence. It was just standing towards the road like where I was. As soon as I saw it, it ducked under the wood. So I go and I get home, and I opened the gate to the house and I don't see anybody behind the fence. There's nobody. My stepdaughter would always tell me how she felt sleep paralysis whenever she was in that house. And I still have dreams about that house. I have dreams where I'm living in this house again, but it's bigger almost, and it has more rooms. The one thing that always freaks me out is it has that same negative energy and I feel like there's always something watching me. When I'm in that house. In my dream at the same place, my stepdaughter had found bones outside on the ground. She was digging doing something I don't know, being a little but she come in and she goes, Daddy, I found bones. He was like, no, no, this isn't good. You found bones. You need to go take that outside. You know, you don't know if anything can attach itself to you or follow you in here. You need to take it outside. You can't keep that. In the middle of him talking to her, I think they leave the room, but I'm in the kitchen. I'm standing there and all of a sudden, I hear some deep voice behind me laughing, and so I turn around and there's nothing. I almost felt like it was laughing at the situation. I don't know. I thought that was really strange. One day, we're talking to the name and the neighbor tells us a little bit of information. He goes, you know, there was a lot of people that used to live in this house. A lot of people have come and gone. And we're like, oh, really, and he goes, there are a couple of girls that just happened to move in and they weren't here very long, maybe a couple days later after moving in, in the middle of the night, they just ran out of the house. They didn't even take their stuff, they left everything. They just ran out of the house and they never came back. Apparently, any other family that has lived there, they have never stayed that long. They just they kept moving too, and we still stayed there. We stayed there for about seven eight months, and it got to the point that before we went to bed, we would have to say the prayer Psalms ninety one out of the Bible, the whole verse Psalms ninety one. After saying that prayer, we wouldn't experience anything. One night, however, after saying that prayer, my ex told me that in the middle of the night he heard footsteps coming towards the door of our bedroom, but it stopped right at the door, like it couldn't go any pass like anymore, like it couldn't go past the door. It realized this and it started growling. It would more happen to him. He would see stuff, or my stepdaughter would feel stuff. I would see stuff or hear stuff, but I always ignored it, so I didn't experience it as much. But my ex come to me one day and he was like, listen, we got a move because this is just getting too much. I think it just got too much for him to handle all the stuff that was going on because it was every single day. We just felt like we couldn't get a peaceful night's sleep without saying the prayer or anything. So seven eight months later we ended up leaving. As we're packing and we're getting our stuff and we're leaving, I was one of the last people to go in. I don't know if this really means anything, but we had there were mice in the middle of the floor and they were just like keeled over dead. They were just laying there dead. That's weird because mice don't really do that. I don't think it's so oh. My ex and I both thought, you know, maybe these entities here were just so bored that they had to mess with these mice because these mice were just in the middle of the floor dead and I have never seen anything like that in my life. I ended up leaving my ex and then I met my now fiance. We ended up getting our own place where we are living now, and it's a little apartment. I haven't really experienced anything. Except one day I'm in the shower and my fiances in there doing something at the sink and I see this shadow go from the sink over to the door. I look out and I'm like, Chris, was that you? And he goes, no, I haven't moved from this spot. I'm like, you literally didn't just go towards the door. You didn't move it all. You didn't just walk away from the sink and move and he goes, no, I didn't do that at all. And I literally that that kind of freaked me out because I was like, am I really seeing stuff? I literally thought I saw a shadow move and no, it wasn't anything. So I'll be completely honest. My ex wasn't really a good person. So part of me wonders if all the stuff that was going on when I was with him, if it wasn't like attached to him because he held his own negative energy around him. The fact that these things were happening wherever I was with him, I almost wonder if like they were feeding off of his energy and like showing themselves. I've never really looked into why I'm so aware of these things, but I kind of almost wonder if I'm sensitive to this stuff. I'm also very thankful that you know, none of that has ever followed me. And maybe it's because I haven't reacted to them, is why they don't really follow me. I'm not sure, but I think it has helped that every experience that I've had, it hasn't gotten any worse with me because all I've ever done is ignore it. A huge thank you to Tory for sharing her experiences with the rest of us here at the True Scary Story community and for everyone else. If you have a scary story that you want to share something that happened to you, head on over to true scarystory dot com because I want to hear about it. This episode was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Window of VW Sound, with additional production by me Edwin go Arubjaz and The Scary FMTAM. If you're following the show, you'll get more stories next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.