You can get these ad-free through ScaryPlus.com free for 14 days, then 4.99 per month. Cancel anytime.
You can find Edwin social media as @edwincov
Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhees Wendel from VW Sound
Get in touch to share your story through TrueScaryStory.com
Join our community:
Facebook.com/scarypod
Instagram.com/scarypod
tiktok.com/@truescarypod
[00:00:00] Nicht warten, durchstarten mit Indeed! Beschleunige dein Recruiting jetzt auf indeed.com.dulep. Mit einer Premium-Stellenanzeige wird dein Angebot ganz oben auf der Seite platziert. Für mehr Sichtbarkeit, damit du schneller die richtigen Mitarbeiter findest und einstellen kannst. Und das Beste, das alles funktioniert ohne monatliches Abo oder langfristige Verträge. Du zahlst nur für Ergebnisse.
[00:00:23] Sicher dir jetzt 75 Euro Guthaben auf eine Premium-Stellenanzeige auf indeed.com.dulep. Es gelten die AGB. Some people live in haunted houses. But what if the hauntings follow you everywhere? From sleep paralysis to ghostly whispers, something has always been watching him. My name is Edwin. And here is Ted's true scary story.
[00:00:49] My name is Ted. I'm from Vietnam. And I came here when I was a teenager. I was 13. I'm from Orange County, California. It all really started when I was in high school in the early to mid 2000s.
[00:01:13] We lived in the apartment for low income folks. And really the first time editing the iPad experience was one afternoon after I got home from school. Usually my parents would be at work. My siblings, they would be at school. So I would be home by myself for a couple hours.
[00:01:43] In this apartment, once you walk in, you hit the living room first. And then on your left side, you see the kitchen window. And on the right side is a hallway to the bedroom. I came home and I heard water running in the kitchen. And I heard the opening and closing of the kitchen cupboard.
[00:02:10] Thinking, you know, maybe it's my mom. Sometimes she would come home early. I turned right into the hallway to go to the bedroom just to take a nap after school. And I yelled out to my mom and said, hey, can you wake me up in a couple hours? And I heard a reply. It was a raspy female voice. OK, Con. OK, my son in Vietnamese.
[00:02:37] The voice was raspy. So I thought, you know, maybe she's sick and she must have a cough and that's why she was raspy. And that's why she came home early from work. So I went to take a nap and then, well, an hour later, I got a phone call and it was my mom. But I answered and she said, hey, what did you want to eat? Because she had to stay late at work and she was not going to go to cook dinner.
[00:03:04] And I realized that whoever was in the kitchen early was not my mom. You know, that time right before sunset when it's still light outside, but then inside your house is still dark. It was pitch black and inside was an eerie silence. And I told my mom, please come home early. And I was like a teenager, but I was still a kid.
[00:03:31] I sat up in bed and I was so afraid I didn't want to move because I didn't close the bedroom door. And now I'm staring into the dark hallway. And the whole time thinking, you know, who was that? Thankfully, my dad came home like 20 minutes later and I asked everyone in the house, did anyone come home early earlier? And no one said that they did.
[00:03:56] That's chalked it up to my imagination, but it left a nagging feeling that it was something more than that. About six months later, I had just gone back from wrestling practice and I was exhausted. So I dozed off to sleep. And usually I had a radio alarm clock next to me. I was asleep listening to the radio.
[00:04:23] This time, I woke up suddenly and not knowing where I was. I woke up, but my eyes were still closed. I heard this music playing from the radio. And I remember I let the radio on when I went to sleep. I realized I must be in bed. So I opened my eyes and I could no longer hear the song.
[00:04:52] And I was staring at the ceiling, unable to move. So I yelled like, ma, ma. I could only hear the sound in my head because my mouth wouldn't open. So I closed my eyes for a moment and I heard the song. The song was on radio. So I knew that I was in bed. And also I knew I was awake, but I could not move.
[00:05:17] So I opened my eyes, looked at the ceiling and I could not move. And I couldn't hear the song anymore. So I kept doing that. I don't know how long. It felt very long. I felt my arms and my legs moving finally. So I was like, yes, I'm finally awake. And I was sleeping on the edge of the bed. So I thought, you know, if I turn over and I fell down, it hurts, but then I would wake up.
[00:05:44] So I tried moving my arms and my legs over and I turned over and I felt my body falling. And I felt the thud as it hit the floor. And I felt the shock and the pain of it. I must be awake by now. So I opened my eyes and I'm still back in bed, looking at the ceiling. I tried again. I tried falling off the bed again and it kept doing that. And I was stuck in a nightmare.
[00:06:14] But a few times I finally woke up. When I woke up, I couldn't trust that I was really awake. I was sweating so much. And it was that cold sweat and my shirt was damped with sweat. And my heart was racing. That was the first time that I truly felt afraid. It was fear of being locked inside your own body.
[00:06:41] Shortly after that, I had my first vivid or lucid dream. In my dream, I was at home, but nobody else was there. And the layout of the apartment I was in, in the dream, it was the same. Same layout. But the furniture was different. It was older. It was dustier. I walked out from my bedroom to the hallway. And there was a fallen mirror there with a diagonal crack on it.
[00:07:11] I walked in front of it and I saw the reflection of a little Caucasian boy with a bow cut, blonde hair and blue eyes. And I said to myself, this isn't real. I must be dreaming. I woke up. And it was the first time that I realized that I could tell that when I'm in a dream or not. And it was one of those vivid dreams.
[00:07:37] The next time that I had another vivid dream, I was floating around the apartment. This time, the furniture in the room was in the house was also different than the previous dream. I was floating around. I wasn't walking. I went through the kitchen. I went through the sliding door in the kitchen to the backyard. And immediately, I came face to face with a darker skinned Hispanic and Native American man.
[00:08:06] No, he didn't look scary or anything. But he said, what are you doing in my house? And I very confused with a very loud voice that I could hear in my head. I was shocked, you know. I could hear him and I could see his face. And I woke up sweating again. And I was like, okay, maybe I was a spirit back in the day or something. It felt like that.
[00:08:33] Everything that has happened so far, it was all in my dreams. So, I just thought again, I have a very active imagination. It's just, you know, silly dreams. Another few months later, one night I was taking a shower. And then I felt someone watching me. So, I cleaned the shampoo from my face and I looked out through the frosted bathroom sliding door. It was a male figure.
[00:09:04] He was in a light blue button shirt and tan slats. Pulled up way past his belly. And a green hard hat. Very official looking. So, I was like, oh my God, someone is in the back of the room. So, I slid open the frosted door. No one was there. I stayed there for a moment. I must have imagined the whole thing.
[00:09:34] I was so scared. I didn't even finish showering. I just rinse off and I dried up and I ran out into my room. That night, my dad told me that my paternal grandfather is dead. He passed away in Vietnam. At that time, I turned on Yahoo Messenger to communicate with the family in Vietnam. Find out what happened. And then, a few days later, we watched the funeral procession on the internet.
[00:10:03] A few weeks later, we got a DVD from Vietnam from the funeral. And we all watched it. And at the end of the video, there was a slideshow showing all the photos of my grandfather. During the slideshow, a picture popped up. I had to pause the DVD because it was a picture of him in his youth volunteer uniform.
[00:10:28] Like blue button shirt, tan slats and a green white jungle hat. I couldn't believe it. My whole family is Catholic. But they did not believe in ghosts and demons or anything because it's the house of God. And God wouldn't let any supernatural things happen. Just talking about it was not looked favorably upon. So I calculated what time that I saw the figure.
[00:10:59] It was a few minutes after he passed in Vietnam. The following year, we moved to a different apartment. And the thing about Orange County, California is it's home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese immigrants. And there have been a few generations that have been here before the 70s, before the end of the war.
[00:11:26] So we were all excited to move to a new, more spacious, two-story apartment. At that time, I was going off to college, but I stayed home to save money. That's when the sleep paralysis escalated. I started seeing figures. I felt the bed move during the sleep paralysis episode. The stereotypical hat man staring at me.
[00:11:56] The hat woman straddling me while I'm in the sleep paralysis and looking at me. One time I was sleeping in the living room on the couch and I had sleep paralysis and I heard someone walking up the stairs. It was a two-story apartment. So the second story, we had stairs going up. So I was in the living room and I had sleep paralysis and I heard someone moving up the stairs.
[00:12:26] Slowly but intentionally walking so you can hear them, the footsteps. Thud, thud, thud. And the deep voicemail said, you know, I'm coming to get you. And by this time, I'm used to it. So I knew how to wake myself out of sleep paralysis. I just used to shake my head really hard and if I shake it really hard, I would wake up. I'm a very skeptical person. I like to think I'm rational.
[00:12:56] So I looked into it and there was proposed theories on how or why sleep paralysis happens. It's the theta brain waves invading other type of brain waves during sleep. And normally your body is paralyzed so you don't act out your dreams. So sometimes you wake up and your mind is woken up and your body hasn't woken up with it. So you're still paralyzed. I rationalized it as, you know, it's just something that happened. It's a physiological phenomenon. It's not real.
[00:13:26] So I just kept on living my life and with sleep paralysis, you know, that is something common. And then one night, I was studying in the living room again, well early into the morning, around 3 a.m. I heard footsteps coming from the bedroom upstairs. That's not too abnormal. You know, people in my family, they would come down for a glass of water. But this time it was my teenage sister.
[00:13:57] She had like a dazed look on her face. She was staring in the distance. And she was walking through the living room and she walked into the kitchen. So I thought, you know, maybe she's sleepwalking. And it's the first time I've seen someone sleepwalking. So I pay attention. I didn't want to wake her because I read all the lore that you're supposed to wake a person that's sleepwalking. You just guide them back to bed.
[00:14:24] So she walked to the kitchen and she walked through the kitchen window. She opened the imaginary door. She looked up and down. And she closed the door. And she turned around and she went back to bed. So a few weeks later, I found out incidentally from the landlord that the tenant before last. They had a brown fridge next to the kitchen window.
[00:14:55] The picture he took before they moved out. Because you know before people moved out back then, they just came in and took pictures to see if there would be damage. And he dug it up and showed me. And there was a fridge exactly where my sister was pretending to open the door. And I couldn't believe it because it was exactly where she was at. In front of the kitchen window. But again, you know, I wasn't allowed to talk about any of this in my house.
[00:15:25] So I explained it away as a coincidence. You know, I just brushed it off. It's early morning. I went down to the kitchen again to get water. As I turned the corner into the kitchen, I saw someone sitting there in the dark at the kitchen table. And I figured it looked like my dad.
[00:15:55] I was like, hey dad, what are you doing awake? He didn't answer me. Oh yeah, I got some water. Went back up. And you know, the door to my parents' bedroom was open. I was drinking water and I looked in and I saw my parents sleeping in there. So I stopped. I turned on the light and I ran downstairs.
[00:16:28] Of course, there was nobody there. Another late night study. I was sitting there with a laptop on my chest. After an hour in that position, my back was hurting a little bit. So I sat up to put my laptop on the coffee table. And just before I put it down, the table slid like a good foot away from me.
[00:16:55] And the coffee table was not too heavy, but it was heavy. I just held the laptop in my hands and I froze. I'm trying to process what happened. And in California, earthquakes aren't that uncommon. So I just like, I explained it away as an earthquake. You know, but I knew that it was an earthquake. The whole apartment there, we'd shake and move. And not just one coffee table.
[00:17:28] So now I'm two years into college. We woke up and do a dishes in our house. My baby sister was born. She was a joy of our lives and I loved taking care of her and spending time with her. When she was two, I was taking care of her one morning and we were alone in the two-story apartment. And after giving a bath and I put clothes on her, I was going to take her downstairs to get something to eat.
[00:17:54] And I had turned the corner and I was a couple of steps down the stairs and she was about to go with me. When she turned back to look at the bedroom hallway and she said, hey, look, there's a lady there. So I just grabbed her and I just booked it downstairs. Again, I played out as an imagination and I didn't want to acknowledge it. Shortly thereafter, we had a roommate.
[00:18:21] He was a son of a family friend, so he came in to study. We gave him a place to stay. He shared a bedroom with me. Now the whole time, there was always something going on in the room that I slept in. Things like feeling being watched, waking up, feeling someone sitting in the bed with a depression in the mattress. And especially the door opening on its own.
[00:18:52] So outside of this bedroom is a bedroom hallway. And there was a loose piece of floorboard right outside of it. So if you walk slowly, you would hear the creak of the floorboard. And around 3 or 4 a.m. almost every single night, I would hear the floorboard creaking. And again, I just explained this as someone in my family just probably waking up to get some water.
[00:19:21] But the door, the door kept opening by itself around 3 or 4 a.m. every night. Because I would just wake up with the door open, even though I remember closing the door before I go to sleep. I asked everyone if they opened the door to check on us during the night and nobody said they did. I tried to rule out any physical explanation.
[00:19:49] We closed the window so there's no draft that was pulling the door open from outside. We changed the locks, we changed the door. Then we changed the hole in the door frame where the locking mechanism goes in. So basically we changed the whole thing. Sort of changing the frame because, you know, it was a rented apartment. But the door kept opening unsewn. So one night we were up in bed. He was in his bed, I was in my bed.
[00:20:19] We were each on our laptop. And then we heard the door handle turning. We looked to see who was checking on us. But the door creaked open. And the door handle turned back. There was nobody there. The door was in his face. You had to turn your handle and push to open it. Finally I got up and I closed the door and I locked it.
[00:20:48] Then I was convinced that there was no explanation for a lot of stuff that was happening. The first EVP that we captured, my roommate was an amateur rapper. He would write and record a song. It was like a whole thing in the late 2000s. One afternoon I came back from class and I saw him laying in his bed with his headphones on, editing his songs.
[00:21:17] This time he was staring at his laptop and his face was like flushed. Like he was like red and he looked shocked. So he told me to come here and put your headphones on and listen to this. So he had his audio playback open. And I saw the different spikes of his voice on the audiogram. Before the respect of his voice, there was one single spike.
[00:21:45] So he played it the voice of an older man in Vietnamese, Rang Len, which is keep going. And he was visibly scared and I didn't know what EVP was. It was so surreal at that time. So I put a recorder in my room later and went to school. I made sure that all the doors were closed, that all the windows were closed.
[00:22:13] There was no one at home during the day that people either went to work or went to school. So I got home that day and I listened to the playback. Four hours of static, nothing. And in the middle of doing math, I heard an older lady laughing. I guess from her age, she was a middle-aged lady. Again, I tried to rationalize it.
[00:22:42] Maybe it was the sound from outside, but I checked with the neighbors at that time. There was nobody around. Everybody went to school or went to work. It was weird, so I didn't try to record anything else. Nicht warten. Durchstarten. Mit Indeed. Beschleunige dein Recruiting jetzt auf indeed.com slash julep.
[00:23:09] Mit einer Premium-Stellenanzeige wird dein Angebot ganz oben auf der Seite platziert. Für mehr Sichtbarkeit, damit du schneller die richtigen Mitarbeiter findest und einstellen kannst. Und das Beste, das alles funktioniert ohne monatliches Abo oder langfristige Verträge. Du zahlst nur für Ergebnisse. Sicher dir jetzt 75 Euro Guthaben auf eine Premium-Stellenanzeige auf indeed.com slash julep. Es gelten die AGB.
[00:23:41] One night, I woke up in the middle of sleep and I knew I was having sleep paralysis. I was laying on my side and was looking at my roommate. I said I couldn't see his face because there was a pair of white legs in front of it. Belonging to a girl. And she wasn't my sister because her legs and thighs were not as thin as my sisters. I had a pair of white legs and it turned around.
[00:24:11] It started to bend down. I closed my eyes because I knew whoever it was bent down to look at me. I could tell her to be asleep. But I could feel the eyes looking at me. And I woke up and I saw my roommate laying on his side looking at me. And I could tell that he saw her too because he was scared. But he just turned away towards his wall and went back to sleep.
[00:24:44] Eventually, he found a place on his own and he moved out. I moved to the other bedroom with my little brother. On the wall, there was a heavy wooden cross. A good 10 pounds. It was right where I slept. So it was right on top of my head. One night, I was sleeping. And suddenly, I heard someone yell in my left ear, Tan. That's my Vietnamese name. I just choked it away.
[00:25:12] Just as a reaction, I put my hands up. As I put my hands up, the cross fell into my hand. It pushed into my head. It hurt. I looked at my little brother and he was sleeping. So if someone was really there, he would have heard it. It was really loud either in my ears or in my head. I was confused. There was a little bit of adrenaline too. I woke up and something fell in my head.
[00:25:43] I put a cross on the table. I pulled a cover over my head and went back to sleep and trying not to think about what happened. In 2009, the whole family went back to Vietnam to visit our relatives for the first time. It's been like almost 10 years now. Then we had a little vacation. I went to the Buddhist temple where my grandfather's ashes were kept. It was in this little room where all the other ashes were stored
[00:26:13] with the picture of me seated in front of it. There was a little ceremony. And it was a very solemn atmosphere. Even though I was not a Buddhist, I put my hands together and I listened to it as everyone else prayed. I was in the first row. And then suddenly I felt numb, like I was in sleep paralysis.
[00:26:39] But then while I was awake, I was unable to move. And I felt I was trapped in my own mind and in my own body. My eyes became blurry and I saw the figure in the 10 slacks and the blue shirt and the green hat again. He was standing where my grandfather was standing.
[00:27:09] And I couldn't see his face. But I saw his outline. I was shocked and emotional. I snapped out of it. I couldn't see him anymore. I turned over to my uncle that was standing next to me and I said, Hey, I see your grandfather. And he just nodded. It was more natural to accept the paranormal in Buddhism. At that time, I felt relieved.
[00:27:39] Glad I saw my grandfather one last time. So I thought at the time. We stayed in Vietnam for a few more days. It's customary to have a shrine in the house honoring the ancestors. Basically, you have a place with all the pictures of your ancestors and people would come visit and reminisce about the family members.
[00:28:10] The shrine was on the floor floor. It was a party. I was eating and drinking. I was drunk. I went upstairs to go lay down. I fell asleep with one of my uncle and aunt next to me and 30 minutes or so after I went to sleep. I sat up. I looked at my uncle and my aunt with distant eyes. I stroked my imaginary beard.
[00:28:40] And I said, Is Thames family visiting? Thames is my dad's name. And I continued to say things that I couldn't have known about other family members. They called my dad up. I was talking to him as if I'm his grandfather. My dad is forever Catholic.
[00:29:11] But he went upstairs to the altar and he lit an incense offering for the ancestors. Shortly after that, I fell back to sleep. My great grandfather had a long beard and I bear a resemblance to him. Even the mole on my face is the same mole that he had. That trip, I had to go back to the US earlier. Classes were going to start. I got back by myself.
[00:29:41] I was tired and it was a different time zone and I couldn't sleep. So I put on an exercise with DVD in the living room. I did an hour cardio and then I cooled out with an hour of yoga. And at the end of the yoga session, there was a little meditation. So I closed my eyes and the voice on the DVD chanted, you know, OM. And I didn't have to value above because, you know, early in the morning, I didn't want to like disturb the neighbor.
[00:30:11] After a second OM, I started to feel weightless and peaceful. And in the middle of the third OM, I felt a hard breath on my right ear. And I heard loud with first of multiple voices. It lasted for maybe half a second. And when I opened my eyes and I saw no one around me,
[00:30:39] I was still like a little disoriented from the meditation. I tried to recollect what just happened. I really hear whispers. So I called my friend. I told him, I'm going to sleep over at his house. You know, I've seen enough scary movies. Bad idea. The other person that believed was my little sister, the one that was sleepwalking. She came home one night.
[00:31:09] This time she's the one in college now. She was parked in the car and she was outside. And she saw my dad washing dishes through the window on the second floor. And she came up and said, Hey, um, is your sister here? My aunt. And he said, No, it's late. She's probably at home. You know, why would she be here? And she told him that I saw you washing dishes by the window
[00:31:36] and there was an older woman with white hair in a bun standing behind you. He became defensive. And they told her to stop watching scary movies and imagining things. Eventually I moved out of the apartment. So I would come back sometimes to have a sleepover. One night I went to sleep in the room where the crash fell. This room is belong to my little sister now.
[00:32:05] My sister's closed laptop was in the room. She was away on a school trip. I closed the door. I locked it. I didn't want anything funny to happen. I went to sleep. Suddenly I was shorted awake. Loud music was playing. I turned on the light and the laptop was open. YouTube was on.
[00:32:33] And I told myself it wasn't possible. First of all, the laptop was closed. Even if I was sleepwalking, I didn't know her password to log in. Whoever it was wanted to play a prank with me or wanted to know that, hey, welcome back. Eventually we moved out. So I found out that it was not the apartment. It was me.
[00:33:04] So I moved out to professional school in the country. But my first day in the day, I was so tired. I just crashed on the bed. I didn't care if the bed was dirty or not. I just crashed. I was so exhausted. I opened my eyes to another sleep paralysis episode. I couldn't move. And I heard the door creaking open. There was an Asian woman.
[00:33:34] She was wearing those Chinese flowery pajamas. As she was young with her bow-cut hair, she floated around my luggage. She went around it. Then she straddled me to put her legs on top of me and she looked at me. We were having a staring contest. Her face was pale white.
[00:34:05] She didn't look evil. She was more mischievous. She smiled at me. I smiled at her. I blinked twice. She blinked twice. Then she just cocked her head back and I could hear her laugh in my head. Then she got off me. And then I closed my eyes. The next morning, I told my flatmates what happened.
[00:34:32] And surprisingly, they were supportive and they offered to switch rooms with me. And then I dug up the history of the town we lived in. And sure enough, there was a sizable Chinese immigrant population there. So a year went on. When I was in graduate school, one night I dozed up after studying for 14 hours.
[00:34:57] And you know, if you're in graduate school, you're studying full time for 12, 16 hours a day. I remember it was a Thursday night when I went to sleep. And on Friday at around 2 a.m., I woke up with an uneasy feeling. And I opened my eyes. And I saw a pair of skinny girl legs. And that's when I said, oh my God, it's the same sleep paralysis episode.
[00:35:26] And I looked up to see who it was. I realized if I could look up, I mean, I'm not having sleep paralysis. I'm awake. And I looked up and it was my classmate, Macy. And she whispered, 10. And like a pillar of smoke, she just withered away. I sat right up. Because I could not believe, I just hallucinated someone in my class.
[00:35:57] So I went out for a drink of water to calm my nerves. I came back in to go to sleep. And there was a heaviness in the room. Like the room was under high pressure. It was suffocating. So I turned on the fan and I opened the balcony door. I felt the same heaviness in the room. I just got up to the living room to study. And by 9, I was exhausted because I would have been up 28 hours already.
[00:36:26] My cell phone rang and it was my other friend. Jenny told me that her roommate, Macy, passed away in her sleep. Macy passed at around 1.55 AM. And I saw her at 2. I could still see her in my head. A couple weeks later, I had another lucid dream.
[00:36:55] I was driving a bus with all of my extended family in the back. So I parked the bus at a roadside shack. And I told everyone, hey, wait here. And I went to check out the location of this shack, right? I stepped off the bus into the muddy ground. I felt cold, dirty mud splash above my legs. I was wearing shorts for some reason. So I walked into the building behind the shack. There was a courtyard. And there was a couple of road benches.
[00:37:25] And a few old Asian men were sitting there. I recognized the old man in the tent legs, in the green hat. It was my grandfather. I also recognized my great-grandfather, the old man with the long beard. And in front of them, there was a shimmering, clear, invisible wall of force fields. Like, it was shimmering. So I walked close to this barrier and I pushed on it. And I felt the sting in my hand, like a needle jab.
[00:37:56] But at the same time, as I pushed on it, I felt it pulling me in. I asked my grandfather, hey, what are you doing here? You're dead. He just laughed. And the rest of them laughed too. Slowly, the benches with them started retreating back into the distance. I woke up from this dream and I was crying. And I realized that that was my grandfather saying goodbye.
[00:38:24] And I haven't seen my grandfather since. After that, I got married. We moved into the house and we had a son. Two-year-old toddler, slept over at my mom's place. And he said he wouldn't go downstairs because great-grandfather was there. I feel sure I haven't told him about anything like that.
[00:38:51] I haven't told him about his grandfather or great-grandfather. Around this time, he started having an imaginary friend like all the topists do. But they would only play at 3 or 4 in the morning. That worried my wife a little bit because, you know, he needed to go to sleep. So one time, at 6 or 7 p.m. and I was washing dishes in the kitchen. I heard feet running.
[00:39:19] I was like, okay, my little toddler, why is he awake? Out of the hallway into the kitchen, a Caucasian white boy with bold-cut hair and blue eyes. You remember this boy from the mirror? He ran out of the bedroom into the wall. And then my little toddler came out after him. I took a moment to correct myself and see what happened.
[00:39:49] The activities continued. At this time, we had another baby. Two boys. I was holding the baby in the living room and putting him to sleep. I was holding him. I was sitting in my chair in the living room. And the house was dark. There was a light that came through the window. Probably from a passing car or so.
[00:40:17] In the living room, there was this liquor cabinet. The light shone into the liquor cabinet. I saw a phantom little dress that belonged to a little girl or something. It was flowing in front of the cabinet. Because it was a glass liquor cabinet, not only did I see the dress in front of the cabinet,
[00:40:46] I saw the reflection of it in the cabinet too. I didn't do anything because I didn't want to wake the baby. That's the time that I thought to myself, is this another haunted house? Because I grew up in two haunted apartments. And that was the first time I started to think, maybe it's not the apartment, maybe it's me. One time I fell asleep and someone yelled out my name again.
[00:41:15] There was a younger female voice. It scared me out of my mind because it was loud. It's the loudest voice in my head I've ever heard. I asked my wife, did she call my name? She said no and she went back to sleep. I didn't know what any of this meant. Not waiting. Throughstarting with Indeed.
[00:41:42] Bechleunige dein Recruiting jetzt auf indeed.com. Mit einer Premium-Stellenanzeige wird dein Angebot ganz oben auf der Seite platziert. Für mehr Sichtbarkeit, damit du schneller die richtigen Mitarbeiter findest und einstellen kannst. Und das Beste, das alles funktioniert ohne monatliches Abo oder langfristige Verträge. Du zahlst nur für Ergebnisse. Sicher dir jetzt 75 Euro Guthaben auf eine Premium-Stellenanzeige auf indeed.com. Es gelten die AGB.
[00:42:11] Ich bin ein Laboratorer Scientist. Ich arbeite in einem Hospital. Eine Nacht war ich am Arbeit und ich war in der Pathologie-Rum. Der Hospital-Morphe ist auch in dieser Runde. Ich war ein Stück Tissue für die Testung. Ich war konzentriert auf mein Arbeit.
[00:42:40] Nach mir war ein Cupport. Suddenly, ein Plastik-Fly-Holder und Plans kamen aus der Cabinet, um über die Runde zu der anderen Seite zu verbreiten. Es war nicht so weit. Es kam aus. Es kam aus. Es kam aus. Es kam aus. Aber ich war in der Mitte des Körpers. Ich war in der Steril-Fügel. Ich konnte nicht weg. Ich sagte, ich bin hier, ich arbeite. Ich war hier, ich war mir allein.
[00:43:11] Ich war schnell, als ich konnte. Und ich kam aus. Ein Nacht. Ich habe eine Checklist in meinem Kopf, was ich in der Lage war. Ich war in der Zonen, um auf die nächste Task. Ich öffne die Refrischung mit einer Glass-Tür. Um das eine Blatt zu retrehen, ein Blatt. Ich habe es, und ich schlug die Tür zu.
[00:43:39] In the reflection in the corner of the room, there was a shadow figure. It is solid black, wearing black scrubs. Sitting on the counter in the corner behind me, crossing his arms and looking down. His whole body was black. I didn't process what I saw until a couple seconds later.
[00:44:09] I turned around and there was no one in there. I was the only person there. I just dropped everything, I just ran outside and I tell my co-worker what just happened. Before this, I would just see the phantom lab coat swinging in my peripheral vision. Occasionally I heard the disembodied voices or someone calling my name. But this is the first time that I saw the shadow figure.
[00:44:37] Usually when I do something tedious, I would have my headphones on. I would listen to music or podcasts. I took my headphone out and went to the bathroom. I put it on the keyboard. I came back to the bathroom and I looked at all my headphones. It wasn't there. And I looked all over. I turned the keyboard upside down. I looked at the drawer. I looked on the floor. Then I dropped it. I asked my other co-worker in the room if she was playing with me.
[00:45:06] She hid my headphone and she said no. She knew it was in her corner. So she went out and I just spoke out loud. I said, hey, can you not mess with me? I'm at work and returned my headphone. I got out of the room. Both of us were out. I went to get some water. Two or three minutes later I came back and the headphones was on the keyboard exactly where I left it. I remember I turned the keyboard upside down to look for it.
[00:45:41] I've had this recurring dream where I was in the Vietnamese countryside. I was in one of the villages in the kitchen. It was not a modern kitchen that we used to. It was a shack kitchen. It was a kitchen in a shack basically. And it was a wood fire in a kitchen. I would dream I would help out with the cooking, soaking the fire, butchering the meat. And I remember reaching into the crevice on the side of the stove. I can still see it.
[00:46:09] I received a darkened, half burnt piece of wood. With a forked crack at the handle. So at the handle there's a crack. Just to move the firewood around. And we wake up and not think too much about it. It's just another recurring dream. So it was one of my trips back to Vietnam. That's one time we went to an ancestral home of a distant branch of my family. I was in the countryside.
[00:46:38] And it was a bit of a drive outside the sea. It's a big property. I got to the kitchen. And it was the same shack kitchen. I had a surreal moment. I just stopped there and I looked around. It was the exact same layout. The stove was exactly the same. I felt a little lightheaded. And my arms and legs were weak. Because I could not believe that I saw this in my dream.
[00:47:08] Deja Vu is when you had a feeling that you've done this before. But I knew exactly what this was. I knew the kitchen. I went to the stove. I bent down. I stuck my head in the crevice. I pulled out the same half-burnt stick. With a forked crack at the handle. This was not a coincidence. I didn't share this with the rest of the family. Nobody believed.
[00:47:43] Another dream I had. My routine was I would jog in the morning. One time I woke up to find one of my uncles standing next to me. And put his hand on my chest and tell me to stay home. No, I don't need to run today. He looked just like my uncle. But the only difference is he had a thick mustache. It didn't make sense. He was living in Vietnam. Why would he be here in the U.S. to be?
[00:48:10] I called and I talked to my aunt's uncle in Vietnam. I found out that my uncle was the youngest in the family. My grandma had a miscarriage after having him. And it was a boy. My aunt told me, you know, it could have been him. The uncle that my grandma had a miscarriage. And then a few months later, someone in my neighborhood was taking her dogs out for a jog.
[00:48:40] She was run over by a car. Whose driver ran a stop sign. I wanted to make the connection. But, you know, the timing of the day was off. I dropped in the morning. This accident happened in the afternoon. Later, I realized that if I was destined to get run over that morning, but stay in bed instead, then maybe no one else had to take my place. And there would be no accident at all. But again, that's the conjecture.
[00:49:15] I dream about a family of four playing on the side of the house. It was a Caucasian family. There was a green convertible of personal driving. It was one of those old cars, a GTO. And they were riding their initials in the year in the wet concrete on the side of the house. I didn't see what they were riding, but I knew that's what they were doing. What else would you ride in the concrete? It was a recurring dream.
[00:49:44] I didn't pay much attention to it. It was just a dream. Sometime later in real life, we were looking to buy a house. And the housing market in 21 was very bad. Then one afternoon, after putting our names down at two different houses, the very low hold, we went back home. And on the way, we passed by this house, an open house site.
[00:50:13] And I told my wife, you know what? Let's just go in. Let's try our left. Went in and tore the house. I went out by myself. And I got to the side of the house. And just like when I was in that kitchen, I stopped. I was shaking. There it is. The green convertible GTO. I walked to the side of the garage and I saw the initials in the year in concrete.
[00:50:43] All of a sudden, it's like a rush of intensity. I felt everything. I felt the happiness. I felt the nostalgia. I felt laughter. I felt the shyness. All the emotion that the property has experienced, it shares some of that with me. So the realtor revealed that the owner is retired and wanted to move to the United States and needed to set his house. Usually you need to outbid the other buyer. The price would just go up.
[00:51:13] However, the realtor told me that she was just instructed by the owner, just before we showed up, to settle for $20,000 over the asset price. So that's what we did. We offered $20,000 over the asset price and we got the house. The house has been good and I haven't had any paranormal experience here. My wife asked me, hey, have you seen anything unusual? And I said, no, this is a good house.
[00:51:43] The last thing is all the hauntings happen while we go on vacation. There's been two that's significant. We went to Indianapolis to attend a cousin's wedding and it was a large group of us. We booked a large multi-room house. And the first thing I noticed when I pulled up was this is a very nice Victorian house. Old, but it looks very nice, historic.
[00:52:11] It was in a historic part of Indianapolis. So one night I went to sleep pretty late and I was tired from a day of driving and attending events. My wife was in the bathroom getting ready to sleep. I closed my eyes. And the light was on in the room. It was bright white light. And I felt the room getting darker through my closed eyelids.
[00:52:39] So I figured my wife could have the bathroom and she turned off the light. When I opened my eyes and what seemed like a second later, the room had a flickering yellow hill. I see the room was lit by candle lights. Standing at the foot of the bed was an older white man in colonial outfit. He had a saber or a sword by his side.
[00:53:08] I looked over to my right and there was an older white woman with salt and pepper hair in a white nightgown. The older woman was looking into the distance. But the piloting officer was looking straight at me. I was scared. I pushed myself to sit up. And as soon as I sat up, the older woman turned to look at me.
[00:53:37] I realized I am awake. I'm wide awake. This is an absolute paralysis. I closed my eyes. I didn't want to look at them. I saw myself standing on the sidewalk at an intersection. I looked up and saw the signs for the cross street, Pennsylvania and 22nd. A sedan was speeding and it crossed the intersection. But it hit the pedestrian.
[00:54:07] The pedestrian's face zoomed into mine. And I saw her face. It was an older black woman with short, buzz cut hair. And then a name appeared in my head. Wendell. That's when I opened my eyes and I yelled out, help. My wife came in, came out of the bathroom and she asked what happened. I told her what I've seen and she said, let's just go to sleep.
[00:54:38] I was very unnerved by what I saw. Two apparitions and a memory or something of someone getting run over. So in the morning I looked on the map and Pennsylvania and 22nd is one street over. Of where we stayed. We stayed on 21st and Pennsylvania. I rationalized that I must have seen Pennsylvania and 22nd on the map while I was driving.
[00:55:07] And I must have incorporated that location to where I saw. But I had no explanation for the colonial officer and the woman. I had no explanation for the name Wendell. I Googled car accident and Wendell and that location but nothing came up. I couldn't explain it. A couple nights later, I sat in the kitchen to talk to one of the uncles. It was early in the morning, again 2 or 3 in the morning.
[00:55:37] And I sat on the table across from him. Behind his head on the wall was an oval, vanity mirror. It was angled downward. Where I sat, I could see his reflection and mine. We were in the middle of a conversation and I looked up in the mirror. There was a dark shadow figure moving on the wall behind me.
[00:56:00] It stopped, waved its right hand and continued moving out of view. I turned around right away and of course there was nothing there. I didn't tell anyone until we got home and I told my wife. The last thing happened was in Chicago, Illinois.
[00:56:28] I visited Chicago in 22 to attend for graduation for my master's degree. So we stayed at a hotel near the university. When we put up in a taxi, the hotel did not look exactly like what I expected. It was a thin and long building. And of course, it's in historic Chicago. So we went out to the floor that we were in.
[00:56:56] And I was talking to my wife about what we were going to do tomorrow. So I didn't really pay attention to the interiors of the elevator. We got off the elevator and I looked for the sides to the room. But the first thing I noticed was how wide the hallway was. Usually the hotel hallway is barely enough to fit two people. But this hallway was a good eight foot distance. And it reminded me of one location.
[00:57:25] It looks like a hospital hallway. I told my wife, hey, you know, this looks like a hospital hallway. And she's like, yeah, it does. Because it's really very wide. We passed a door frame on the way to the room. And it reminded me of the safety double doors that the hospitals would have. We made it to a room and we went to sleep. It was late.
[00:57:53] I was fast asleep when I heard the alarms in my head. Or in my ear. I was still not sure. In the background, I heard people talking, yelling. I woke up to this noise. I opened my eyes then and the monitor alarm was gone. But the background talking noise, it echoed for like a good second. Before it did disappear.
[00:58:18] In the morning, I told my wife, you know, hey, I rationalized to my wife that the air vent must have carried the voices of people talking in the other rooms. And I must have gotten woken up at that. And then we got up and went to breakfast in the lobby. So we got in the elevator to go down. This time I was fresh. I was awake. I read the poster that was on the elevator. So this hotel used to be the Cook County Hospital.
[00:58:46] It's one of the first hospitals established in Chicago. It's a civil war hospital. They had their first medical internship. And I'm a blood bank and transfusion specialist. And Cook County is the first hospital with the first institutional blood bank in the whole world. I read about it, but I never looked up what the hospital looked like.
[00:59:12] The wide hallway, the monitor alarm, the people speaking. It made sense then that I would hear it. I didn't feel scared. I felt emotional as a fanboy basically because I was in a historic location. I had to have a moment with myself to realize internally that it's not all these places. It's probably me. Growing up repressive everywhere. We don't talk about these things. It's hard for me to come to that realization.
[00:59:42] I tried to rationalize and disprove as much as I could, but I would accept the things I could not. With paranormal activities, you'll only get it if it happens to you. All these apparitions, they're fine as long as they don't make a noise. It's the ones that talk to you that's extra scary. Because the second sense of hearing is more of a confirmation that this is real, this is happening.
[01:00:12] When you have two or more senses confirming that it's happening, it's no longer something subconscious. It's real, it's conscious.
[01:00:37] Just a side note here, our storyteller today mentioned Wendell, a missing link in his story. He had no idea how it was connected to anything. Well, it turns out our editor and sound designer, Sarah Voorhees Wendell, got us scared today when she heard it. Was it just a coincidence? If you have a true story that you want to share, head on over to truescarystory.com and fill out the form. And if you're following the show, we'll get to hear another story next week.
[01:01:05] Anyway, thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon. Don't wait, start with Indeed. Indeed. Beschleunige dein Recruiting jetzt auf indeed.com slash julep. Mit einer Premium-Stellenanzeige wird dein Angebot ganz oben auf der Seite platziert.
[01:01:34] Für mehr Sichtbarkeit, damit du schneller die richtigen Mitarbeiter findest und einstellen kannst. Und das Beste, das alles funktioniert ohne monatliches Abo oder langfristige Verträge. Du zahlst nur für Ergebnisse. Sicher dir jetzt 75 Euro Guthaben auf eine Premium-Stellenanzeige auf indeed.com slash julep. Es gelten die AGB. Es gelten die AGB. In derhuvas noch einmal im LWT czy B,