The Ghost Child of the Apartment Complex

[00:00:00] Hey, it's Edwin here. Since you're a fan of True Scary Story, I know you're gonna love this. I have a podcast that I would like to recommend. It's called Sightings, a new series that invites you inside the world's most mysterious events. I'm talking legendary encounters like Bigfoot or Roswell, but also ghostly phenomena. Sightings puts you in the center of the action with heart pounding storytelling. You're gonna love it. There's a new episode of Sightings every week.

[00:00:26] Look for it now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something supernatural has been bothering Javier's family, and though seemingly unrelated, there might be a connection between all of these events you're about to hear. My name is Edwin, and

[00:00:44] here is Javier's True Scary Story. One of my earliest experiences with paranormal stuff is probably when I was four or five. I've been in Southern California all my life, but we're living in a city called Southgate, California. That's where I predominantly grew up. The area I lived in was mostly a lot of apartments, a lot of working class Hispanic families. It was a very tight-knit

[00:01:13] neighborhood where I lived. The apartment I lived in, it was a one-bedroom. It was our first, our family's first apartment. I remember specifically for some reason there was something about the living room or living room that would creep me out. I'd be, we lived, since it was a one-bedroom apartment, we lived, we slept in the same bed, and at night I would look into the living room, and then

[00:01:37] I would just see some apparitions of random things. I remember one night specifically looking into the living room, and for some reason I was seeing the corners of the room just pretty much like a black line just tracing through the, through the corners of the wall where the walls meet, and then I was thinking of blood for some reason, so I was just seeing this little trail of dark stuff just fill

[00:02:04] the room at night, and I was looking, I was wondering what that is, and I'd wake my dad up, ask him what that stuff is, and he would say, like he would look, and then you wouldn't see anything. I would hear people talking, but it was as if you're listening to a radio station, and then you get the frequency from another station interfering for a second, and I would just, I'd look around, you know, what was that,

[00:02:27] who's talking, but no one else can hear anything. That's, that stuff went away as I got older. I didn't really experience anything else until I think I was eight or nine. I was staying the summer at my grandma's house in Ontario, and we were good friends with the neighbor next door. I'd play with his kids because we were around the same age, so they had a dedicated playroom in their house,

[00:02:53] so I would go over there, we'd hang out, play games, or whatever. Their house was rumored to be haunted. That's pretty much, every block has a haunted house, and then that specific house was it, so I'd go over there, and I wouldn't stay past a certain time in the evening because that house would creep me out. One day, I was in their playroom, and the kids, the two kids I used to play

[00:03:20] with, they left the room to go do some chores or something. I was in there by myself, and in this house, the story was that there was the old neighbor that used to live there in the 70s or 80s. Apparently, he killed his son or his daughter or something, and those are just stories, but when the current owner, when he was doing the landscaping for his front yard, they uncovered some overalls that had like tears in them or some dark stains, and they couldn't tell if it was blood or not,

[00:03:50] but these overalls were, they were just buried in the front yard. That's the story of it, but when I was in there playing in their playroom, I was in the back corner with my back to the wall, and I was playing with the toys, and then all of a sudden, I hear, shh, shh, someone shushing me behind me. I was like, what was that? And then I immediately thought, the ghost or the spirit that's in the house,

[00:04:17] so when I heard that, shh, I heard it in my ear, clear as day as if someone was behind me. I'm not kidding. When I heard that, I got up. I booked it out of the house. I didn't even look to see what was behind me. I didn't say bye to the family, to the kids or anything like that. I got up. I walked. I just booked it. I went to my grandma's house, and then that was it. I never

[00:04:40] went back into the house again. Fast forward to this is going to be the year 2000, so I'm 10 years old at this point in the apartment we're living in, and it had a fairly large living room. It was one night we had just got these brand new couches, so I decided to break them in by sleeping on the couch the night we got them. It was my sister and I. My sister was sleeping on the little

[00:05:06] couch, and I'm sleeping on the big couch. I'm laying down. I'm falling asleep, and I have the kitchen light on so we can have some sort of light coming on into the living room because it'd be really dark. I normally don't like to face rooms while I'm sleeping. I normally like to have my back to the room in case I wake up. I could just be facing the wall and not be facing someone staring at me.

[00:05:31] For this particular night, I was facing the entire living room. I'm waking up because I'm falling asleep, but it's in the middle of falling asleep and still awake. I open my eyes to look at the living room, and as I'm opening my eyes, I see this person standing in the middle of my living room. This

[00:05:53] is probably this person is probably at least six feet tall, right? This happened probably in the blink of an eye, but I remember vividly. I opened my eye, and then I see someone standing in the middle of my living room. This person looked. There was like a heavy coat on that was really like dirty and ripped. I remember seeing like, I remember seeing a big like a top hat. This person is staring right

[00:06:22] at me, and I couldn't get a good enough look at his face because it was the lighting in the living room was illuminating a silhouette of him. When I saw that in the second that I opened my eyes, I was like, what? Well, I'm looking, and then I was just freaking out. My heart is pounding and everything, and I try to wake my sister up, but she doesn't want to wake up. The rest of the night, I pretty much go back to sleep with my, with one eye open.

[00:06:50] Fast forward five, six years later, it's 2005, 2006. Me and my friends are hanging out in the living room. It's at night, and for some reason, our kitchen light turned on. We're like, what was that? You know, there's no one else in the kitchen, so I go into the kitchen, and sure enough, there's nothing else there. I'm like, man, no, there's no one in here, so I'm trying not to freak out and

[00:07:15] seem tough and cool for my friends or whatever. I turn off the light. I just ignore it. Probably like an hour later, the radio turns on, and we had a little AM FM CD player radio on our table that we used to plug in whenever we would have dinner. We'd listen to music and eat. We heard the radio come on, and it was a radio station. We looked at each other, what's going

[00:07:43] on? I go into the kitchen again, and in the darkness, it's just the radio turned on, and then I unplugged the radio, and nothing else happened that night. It's 2011, 2012. At this point, we're living, and we had moved to Norwalk a couple cities away. It's in Los Angeles County.

[00:08:07] It's right next to Whittier and Downey, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada area. So we're living there, and I used to take my brother to school because he used to go to Cal High in Whittier, the next city over. I would drop him off in the morning, and I'd come home and go back to sleep because I still had some time to get a couple hours in before I would get ready for work.

[00:08:29] I went back to sleep, and I woke up, but for some reason, my bedroom is foggy or mist. It's like a white mist everywhere. I'm looking around confused because I'm in my room. Everything is exactly the same. I could look into the hallway and see the bathroom, and everything's exactly the same. But for some reason, everything is just white. Oh, there's a white mist throughout the

[00:08:56] entire room and the hallway. So I'm confused, and I look at the foot of my bed, and I see this, this, I want to say a male figure, which I thought was my brother because my brother at that time, he had a shaved head, and he was a stocky, taller than me. And I'm looking at this person is wearing all white, like a white robe. Like I said, shaved head, but no facial features. I couldn't see anything

[00:09:23] at all. No nose, no eyes, no mouths, no ears, nothing. The mist that was in my room didn't help neither. That kind of helped conceal his, the person's identity. So I'm looking at this person, and then I asked him, I said, Arturo, what are you doing here? I dropped you off at school a little while ago. I get no response, so I'm staring at this person, and then I start levitating off of my

[00:09:49] bed. And I know I'm levitating because I'm looking around me, and I'm getting, everything that was at my level is below me. I look up, and I notice I'm getting close to the ceiling. I look down, I look over my shoulder, and I see a glimpse of my body sleeping or unconscious. The weirdest part about it for me was that I wasn't scared or afraid. It was just a go with the flow type thing.

[00:10:18] When I couldn't see this person anymore, they're below me now because I'm getting, I'm pretty much inches from the ceiling now. I fall back down onto my bed really fast. Almost instantaneously, I just, I'm back down on my bed. And I wake up, but when I wake up, I can't move a muscle. I'm like in sleep paralysis or something.

[00:10:43] I couldn't move, I couldn't move a muscle. And I was like that, I want to say probably like a minute or two. And I was able to muster up the strength just to get one arm free. It was the weirdest thing because when I was able to get one of my arms just to move, it was shaking as if something was holding it down with all their strength. And I was going against their strength to get my arm free.

[00:11:13] I didn't feel anything physically touch me, but it was that sensation of someone, if you're arm wrestling, you know, you're trying to go against the other person's strength. That's how it was. Because I was finding an unknown strength to get myself free. So I wake up and when I wake up, I'm extremely out of breath. I wake up as if I was underwater. I'm gasping for air. I'm catching

[00:11:42] my breath and I was just wondering what all that was about. I had never experienced anything like that in my life up until that point. I was always curious as to what was the deal with that, especially the part where I was accepting it and just going with the flow of it. I think normally I would have been freaking out and scared, but for some reason this was different. August 2023, up until that point, we were living, my wife and I, I had got married already.

[00:12:12] My wife and I and our two kids, we were living with our in-laws in La Puente, La Puente, California. We moved out August 2023. We got our own, our own apartment in Covina, which is a couple of cities over right next to Azusa by the mountains. Everything was good. The first few months we were living there, everything was real cool. Nice apartment, decent area.

[00:12:37] My wife started experiencing some things in the apartment that would hint to possibly spirits or something lingering in the building or the apartment itself, but it started with our bathroom door. We have the master bedroom and at the end, there's a dark hall. There's a hallway in

[00:13:03] our bedroom and at the end of that hallway is our bathroom. At night, it gets really dark in that hallway. I didn't really think much of it, but like I said, I sleep looking away from the room, so that's just a habit of mine now. But my wife said two, three in the morning, she was watching TV and then she heard the bathroom door creak. My wife is, she's like a little cat. If she hears something out of the ordinary, she's going to stop in her tracks and be like,

[00:13:30] what was that? But she heard the creak. She was staring at the door and she told me that it creaked again. Obviously when it creaked, it moved a little bit. I was thinking it's an old building. She told me this in the morning and I was trying to think of something logical because the last thing I want to think of is living, sharing an apartment with a ghost. But to be fair, the apartment vibrates a lot. It's especially with the neighbors when they close their doors,

[00:13:59] people next to us and upstairs, whenever they close their doors, like our windows rattle throughout the apartment and vice versa. When I close my door, the vibration goes throughout the hallway. So I'm trying to think maybe someone is just closing their door too hard. So we just set it off. A couple of nights go by and at night she said that the door creaked again.

[00:14:22] And I was like, all right, this is weird. I've never really been a skeptic. I've always believed in paranormal and spirits, energies. I always believe that stuff is around us all the time. And I think it's just a matter of respecting it and not taunting it or anything like that. So I was just trying to ignore it. What I did was to make my wife feel better. I oiled up the door hinges

[00:14:51] and we started keeping the door closed of the bathroom. I want to say a couple of weeks later, my daughters have their own room. They have their own beds. So we're sleeping and then my oldest daughter was seven at the time. She comes into my room around 1.30, 2 o'clock in the morning. And she wakes me up and I was like, oh mama, what's wrong? What's going on? And then she says,

[00:15:20] there's a kid in my room. When she said that, I was like, what? She said, there's a kid playing in my room. I was like, oh hell no. When she said that, I was like, oh no, that's it. The last thing you want to hear when you move into a new place. Her room is right next door to mine. So I walk with her

[00:15:48] to her room and I'm not kidding. When I'm walking, I have the nastiest goosebumps and chills on my right arm. It was weird. It was just on my right arm up all the way up to my neck. And I will never forget. I've never felt those types of goosebumps before. I go in there and she says, the kid was sitting right here playing with something. I was like, really? I was like, did the kid say anything to

[00:16:15] you or anything like that? She says, no, it was just there. But before that, she said that when she was waking up, she saw the kid standing at her doorway. With each blink, my daughter would do that the kid would get closer and closer. She said that this kid looked like it had eight arms.

[00:16:38] And I was thinking eight arms. I was thinking maybe the kid was waving or something with calling for help. My wife talked to her best friend about it. And her mom is super into the supernatural stuff. She's old school from Rancho in Mexico. I don't know which one, but she's very spiritual. So she

[00:17:04] believes in all that stuff. She asked us, is there a pool where you guys live? And I was like, yeah, why? She was saying that it's common for kids who have drowned or died in pools or whatever, or large bodies of water to hang out in the area where they died. So I was thinking, okay, this kid had eight arms. If this kid had eight arms and they were probably waving them fast,

[00:17:33] which made my daughter think that this kid had eight arms. If that's the case, maybe this little girl drowned there a long time ago. I tried to do a bunch of research online. There has been a death of a child there, but this was an infant. And that kind of shook me up because I was looking over my

[00:17:57] shoulder for the next few weeks after that. Before that happened, that incident, I was, I had fallen asleep. I was putting my kids to sleep in their room. I fell asleep while putting them to sleep. I fell asleep with them. And then we had just moved in. They just had their mattress. So we hadn't finished building their bunk bed yet. I'm laying on the mattress with my youngest

[00:18:22] daughter and we fall asleep. I'm sleeping. And I feel the mattress pressed down as someone sat on it. Right. I thought it was my dog because we have a Yorkie, but the Yorkie is probably 20, 25 pounds or whatever. The press of the bed woke me up. And then, but I, when I wake up, there's nothing there. I felt it clear as they, the bed pressed down as if someone sat on it. I'm looking around.

[00:18:50] There's no one else there other than my kids. I look at the doorway. I could feel or sense that something was there standing at the doorway, blocking or looking into my kid's room. I'm looking at this door where there's nothing there. I'm looking at it though, as if there's something was there. I knew in my heart that there was something standing there, even though there was

[00:19:16] nothing physically there. That's when I started raising eyebrows. Our kitchen is on the right side of the apartment and then the dining room and then the hallway for the bedrooms. They're on the left side. I'm doing dishes. This is in the afternoon. I had all the lights off in the apartment, but in our, so our hallway looks a little dark. So I'm doing dishes there and I see, it was like a rush

[00:19:43] of fog that would come out of the hallway really fast. It just disappeared. It was as if the fog was being shot at me and I could only see it from the corner of my eye. I saw it maybe twice. I look over there, obviously there's nothing there, but then I see it again a few minutes later and I'm like, nah, I think I'll trip in. I think I'm just stressing out over this apartment. I went to work and then I

[00:20:11] told my coworker about what was going on. And then, so he brings me a bottle of holy water. So we're walking around the apartment and we're burning, we're burning sage in all of the rooms and we're putting holy water and saying a prayer throughout the entire apartment. We cover the walls, we cover the ceiling, the floors, the kitchen, the dining room. We're trying to just cover as much

[00:20:35] as we can. This was probably a month ago, a couple months ago. I was out, I was in the hallway walking to the parking port, the carport and our next door neighbor was out there. So we start talking, me that lives there and then his wife. We're just the cheese man's just talking about just stuff that's going on in the neighborhood or whatever. I asked him, did you guys know the people who lived there before us? They said that they would see them around, but they wouldn't really talk. They were a young

[00:21:03] couple that was there for only a year. So I was like, were they weirder or anything like that? They're like, no, they just cut to themselves. And then I was like, all right, cause I'm going to tell you, cause when we moved in the story, I told you about the apartment. That's what I told them. When I told them the story, the husband looked up the wife and then the wife, her eyes widened. And she said, dude, I'm going to tell you this. Whenever we have family over,

[00:21:30] our relatives would always ask us, who's the little kid that was playing in here? So she said that there's a little kid, a little girl who has wandered in her apartment and her family, her relatives have seen it. And they ask her about it and they're like, oh, just ignore it. They were telling me that the, that they've seen the kid and their children, they have three kids out of there. They also have seen the kid. One night they had their, one of the in-laws watching the apartment for them. They were just there hanging out.

[00:22:00] The relative was sitting in the living room and then in the hallway, cause the layouts of the apartments are the same. So in their hallway, there's the doorway. And then to one end is obviously the end of the hallway. And the other side is like where the bedrooms are that he saw a little kid or a little girl running past that doorway from one end of the hallway to the other. And that he saw it and that he was like, nope, I'm out. So he just, he left the apartment.

[00:22:29] So they called him and like, Hey, there's a, what was up with that kid? And then the, that the people who ran out that unit, they're like, dude, honestly, we just ignore it. That kind of corroborated what was going on with us. I was asking everyone I meet at the apartment, I just asked them if they knew of anything that's going on there or anything like that.

[00:22:52] But no, no one can seem to find anything to talk about. When the couple moved out before we moved in the husband that lived there, he was saying that he would hear a knocking from the other side of the wall, which would be our bathroom. When he said that it made that kind of brought me back to him where my wife was saying how the door would creak of our bathroom. But he was saying that when no one

[00:23:19] was living in our unit, that someone was like knocking on that wall and on the other side would be their kitchen. So they were hearing knocks in their kitchen coming from our bathroom when no one was living in there, which I thought was weird. But yeah, ever since we cleansed the apartment, we haven't had any incidences and we haven't had any like bad energies or anything like that.

[00:23:44] So we try to do that every so often just to maintain it. Make sure you stick around for a short clip about Javier's explanation and additional insight. Thank you, Javier, for sharing your story with us. If you have a true scary story that you want to share, find our form over on truescarystory.com.

[00:24:10] If you wanted to share a story but would rather have me read it for you, send me an email. I have a section on my podcast called Paranormal Club where I'm looking for true paranormal encounters. I'll leave my contact information in the description of this episode. Scheduling for this story was done by Bianca Chavez with production by me and the Scary FM team. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon. Here's the additional clip I promised.

[00:24:39] One thing I did learn that helps a lot, at least with us, was when it was opening up the windows, all of the windows of the apartment. Just letting the old air go out and letting the breeze of the new air come in. That may not seem like a big deal, but for us that was actually, it was rejuvenating. It hit the reset button on the, on all the energies inside. You know what? It was weird because my,

[00:25:04] at first my wife would blame me on the podcast I would listen to, one of yours being. Yeah, because, because at that time I had started listening to like hard podcasts around June, July. And so at first she was like, man, it's all that scary stuff you listen to at work where, you know, you bring it home with you and all this stuff. It's manifesting. But we were honestly thinking too, is that where, where we used to live before with my in-laws, there was, there's a lot of

[00:25:33] negative energy in that house. We won't go in there at all. It was affecting us when we were living there, whatever is in, whatever energy is there. I think we, we brought some of that bad juju with us to the apartment and that was manifesting itself in, in, in certain ways. I think like when I, we started closing the bathroom door in my head, I'm thinking this thing is trying to show itself or to

[00:26:02] make itself known. And when we started closing the bathroom door at night, I like to think that we took away its ability to present itself to us. Where to listening to your podcast? Your podcast is the one that got me into horror podcasts. So after there were certain times where I wouldn't listen to your shows past a certain time working because I get off at nine o'clock at night. Right. So I remember there would be stories on the Ouija board or whatever, and it was very dark. I was

[00:26:31] like, no, I'll listen to it tomorrow when the sun is out. So