The Wallwalkers: Memories of a Childhood Nightmare

They would appear to me, and forms that were awful, horrific, The most horrific things I couldn't imagine. What I called them was wallwalkers. In the nineties, JD lived in a Phoenix apartment complex where his imaginary friends weren't so imaginary. They crawled out of the walls, whispered names, and sometimes they turned on him. My name is Edwin, and here's JD's true scary story. I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, when I was a child, which is in a valley called the Valley of the Sun. It's got three thousand years of human history between Sedona and the Superstition Mountains. It's a place that's steeped in a lot of legend and a lot of myth, and a lot of ghost stories and a lot of ghosts. It's even got the disappearance of the people who originally settled at the Joho cum. This is where I lived, right in the center of all that. This chapter of my life is not when I remember that fondly, I lived in the poorest parts of that city, surrounded by drugs and crime. It's a time where I experienced a lot of things children shouldn't experience. Can't help but feel that what happened my circumstances that I was living in at the time, the circumstances that surrounded my living situation are connected. In that environment, all people find ways to cope. In case of my family and my parents, both my parents were addicts. Addiction is a disease. It's terrible, but the people who suffer from it are people. As I tell stories about this thing, I always go out of my way to say that my parents are people. They made mistakes, but they did their best for me at the time. A lot of what I'm going to be describing sounds terrible. It sounds like I was in the worst situation as possible, the people around me were doing their best. I feel like that's important to say. The way I learned to cope as a kid was through my imagination. I'm gifted with a strong imagination, with a very vivid capacity to weave stored worries in my mind, and as a kid, I lived in my own world, sort of portraying it over top of what was around me and the drugs and the crime. It didn't really affect me because I wasn't really there. It's really normal for kids to have imaginary friends, especially if they're quite lonely like I was, and I had an imaginary friend. His name was Chewy. For those who may not be familiar with Mexican Spanish, Chewy is a really common diminutive form of the name Haeseus, used generally in Mexico and in first generation Mexican families. Interestingly enough, I have no connection to that culture or history. I had no way at that time of knowing that name or having any context for understanding that name. No members of my family had that name, no family friends had that name, none of the parents of any of my friends had that name. This name just kind of appeared out of nowhere. I just named my imaginary friend Chewy. He was a friendly face for me to play with when I had no one else around. Unlike what was typical for kids, I didn't have a specific room that I would play with Chewy in. I'd play with Chewi anywhere. I took him with me, anywhere I went, the grocery store, doctor's appointments. I would play with him in any room of my house, play with him at school, constant companion. As time went on, and as I really started to get more and more enmeshed in this story and playtime, I began to speak in broken Spanish. Nobody taught me any Spanish. I certainly was never around anyone who spoke it that often. I had babysitters who were Mexican and would speak Spanish, but they didn't speak it to me. They spoke to me in English. I had no real reason to speak Spanish, but I had started to pick up bits and pieces from somewhere. I would speak to Chewy, my imaginary friend, and broken Spanish quite often, back and forth, back and forth. This goes on for a good year. As the playtime becomes more common to me, the number of my imaginary friends starts growing. Starts at two, then three, four, end up with like sixteen different imaginary friends, each with names, each with personalities. I would talk to each one of them, even though that you know, Chewi was the one I interacted with the most. But I had just a vast number of imaginary friends living with me in my house, in this little apartment. My parents they kind of took it as well. I mean, you know, this is cute. We're glad that he's dealing with this. He's dealing with the circumstances we're in right now, and they didn't think much of it. But things started to change a little bit. I've always suffered from terrible migraines and night terrors. These days, I don't really get night terrors so much as I just have nightmares. Thankfully. When I would get migraines and have night terrors, I would dream of my imaginary friends. They would appear to me in forms that were awful, horrific, the most horrific things I couldn't imagine. What I called them was wallwalkers because the way they appeared in my dreams was as naked, hairless, a rack. They'd kind of beans. They looked humanoid, but they crawled on all fours and I would see them come out of the walls and my dreams as if the wall hung over them like fabric. They would just crawl out from underneath them. I have had seizures as well as a child, and I would see them while I was awake. While having a seizure, I would see them crawling out from the walls. When I would come back from seizures, I would be awfully. I would just be terrified, just petrified. It's not normal for kids to be frightened of their imaginary friends. It's not typical. Usually a child makes an imaginary friend as a coping mechanism. But for some reason, mine turned into terror. Mine turned into things that haunted me. From that point, I went from an imaginative child in bad circumstances to a solemn, drawn child who was frightened and afraid of being outside and going into the world because I could only see terror in the shadows, just constantly stalked by these things in my waking dreams. The change was so immediate that my parents noticed, particularly my mom. She would sit me down and talk to me about this topic and tell me this isn't real. You imagine your friends they're they're just pretend. They're just in your head. You can control them, you have all the power of them. But it would never work. As time went on, and as our situation got worse, I would frequently get upset and angry with my sister and my parents, and I would point my finger at them and say, if you make me angry, the wall walkers will get you. Would use them as threats. That's what they had become to me, something so terrible that I could threaten people with them. They would experience the same terror that I experienced having a child change like this for your eyes and then seeing him point at you and say that these things are going to get you. My mom was rightfully a kind of a praise, was terrified. Really, there's no understanding of what's going on. A lot of things happened around that point in my life. A lot of events happened in confluence. My dad got into a car accident, a really bad car accident. He ended up being prescribed to pain medication that he became addicted to rest of his life. That mixed with money problems and my sister leaving the house and going to live with someone else, it was a terrible time. It feels like all of that negativity, all of that dark power, just colessed inside of my imagination. But it wasn't just my imagination that played these events out. There was things that happened in that apartment that brings a new element to this situation with what I was imagining. At night, when we would all be asleep, we would hear the cabinet doors and the refrigerator door in the kitchen open and slam shut. We would constantly hear movement down our hallways. We would experience just constant banging in the walls, scratching in the walls. No matter what we tried, our house always accumulated flies, especially around the windows, but also just in the house. We would fumigate, we would clean, we'd do everything in our power to get rid of them, but the flies would never go away, to the point where at one juncture we had maggots crawling out from underneath our carpet. These were not carpet beetle larvae. These were like fly larvae. These were magots crawling out just in mass, from underneath our carpet. And we had fumigated this house so many times. There was no reason anything but humans and dogs would be alive in this house. There's just simply no reason. It was a strange environment. It was a deeply disturbing one, and it feels like what hung over that place just infected everyone who lived there. You know. It was so bad that my sister used to come up with ghost stories about my imaginary friends. That's how terrifying this was. She would come up with literal like ghost stories to scare her friends about the things I would tell her that were going on in my little, you know, imaginary world. I've had two very visceral experiences in that place, relating to things I can't explain. One of them was when I was very, very very young. I didn't quite I understand how to lock doors. That's how young I was. I didn't quite understand how the mechanism on a door lock worked, so I couldn't lock the doors myself. And I went into the bathroom and I did my business, and I went to leave, and I had closed the door behind me, and I found I couldn't open the door. It was completely fast and shut. I hadn't locked, it hadn't locked by accident. Frankly, I don't think i'd even closed the door all the way, but the door was completely sealed. I couldn't pull it. I couldn't do anything. I was probably three, maybe four, and I have vivid memories of just panicking, slamming my fists on the door, just begging to be let out. There was no one in my house. Everyone was at a party down the way at a different apartment, so I was totally alone. I had gone to use the restroom just I couldn't get out. There was nobody there. I just kept slamming on the door for an hour, hour and a half until someone finally came to find to me and let me out. That bathroom like was a focal point for a lot of things. I don't know why. I don't know what in particular about it, but I was horrified to that bathroom. I had a terrible experience right as I was starting to take showers by myself. I had just gotten enough courage to close the door and take my own showers by myself as a kid. No, it's a a big growth point. Right I was in the shower, I was washing my hair. I was actually really enjoying myself. I was like, you know, maybe maybe this is okay, Maybe it's okay to take showers by myself. And I just felt frozen all the sudden. I just felt cold, like the water was so hot. I kept the water so hot, but it just felt freezing all of a sudden, there was just no heat in the world for a minute, and I just had this urge to look behind me. When I did, I saw this white blur. I just looked at dead in the eye. It was a mist figure, almost a white shadow that moved as if it was peeking in the shower at me, and then immediately once I had noticed it, flicked back. Being a kid at the time, I didn't understand this. This did not compute. It's just too many things all aligning in that place, too many experiences, all correlating, too many bad experiences, too many bad life events, and all of it centered on me. That place hated me. That place wanted me to be miserable. Something there I don't know if it was chewy or if it was something else. Could have been many things, given how many names I gave to things, how many faces I said there were looking back at me for my own dreams. But something about that place just wanted me to join them, wanted me to act as their voice, their conduit. Almost. It felt like I felt like a bridge and they exposed themselves to me and no one else. And that was probably the worst experiences of my life, all situated in that one place. Pound for pound, I would say that Phoenix, Arizona, and the surrounding areas are probably the most paranormally active places in the United States. A lot of places claim that, a lot of places say they're famous for that. I think Arizona's the real deal, because not only do you have people who live there now saying they have experiences, you have people going back a thousand years with oral legend of experiences they've had in that place. Another experience I had was in my grandmother's house. She maintained a room for her grandchildren to stay in. When we were over, we had our own room. Basically, it was like a you know, if we lived there, it would be our bedroom on the wall. She had a couple of dolls, and I never had issues with these. Usually I wasn't afraid of dolls. I had no problem with dolls. But one night, as I was laying down to go to sleep, I wasn't asleep yet. I've had sleep process, so I can say with certainty that this wasn't sleep process. There is nothing like it. In sleep processes. You can't move, You can't even blink, really, you can only just stare at what's happening. I could move as fully awake. I leaned up. They look up. The light from outside the bedroom is casting in. It focuses on this one doll's face, and she looks down at me and she says hello right to me, just in her childlike tone. So clearly, so crisply, undeniably. I screamed. I crawled out of that room. That's how scared I was. I crawled out and just ran into the living room. I got right into my Granma's lap, and I refused to go back in that room. It got to the point where to even make me go anywhere near it, they had to take the doll down and hide it. I didn't want to know where it was, but I knew. I knew exactly where they put it, because every time I walked past that room, I'd feel this sense of dread, this sense of terror. I would always feel watched there, And that's a pretty common feeling for people in many parts of that city, in that state particularly, it's this constant feeling of being watched. I remember where you are. If you go out into the mountains, you'll feel watched. If you go out into the Superstition Mountains, I think everyone who goes there reports feeling watched at some point. Those places, it's a strange place. It's a strange place. Another experience I had that was actually at the same house where I was living as a small kid. It gets very hot in Phoenix. You know, everyone knows that. So I was a boy and very young, so I had no problems at all, just taking my clothes off and being cool. And one night I was sick and tired of being hot, so I opened my window, close off, laid out right next to it. In Phoenix, grass is relatively uncommon because water is at a premium and grass is extremely expensive to maintain, so people line their yards with rock instead, like a small small stone, small pebbles, and they have a very distinctive noise when you walk on them, a crunching sound, undeniable. And as I was laying near my window, I hear that crunching sound walk up next to me in this house. While I'm laying there in the window, I'm just petrified with fear, petrified. I look out. There's nobody there, nobody complete, just the empty desert night looking back at me. That's it. I gather up the courage to move. I lift my hands up, I pulled down the window, pulled down the shade, and just lay there like a log. And then I hear the sounds of somebody walking away again, that crunching like feet walking on the stones. Yeah, it's hard for me to It's hard for me to relive some of this. I haven't really talked about it before. It's something I bury deep because I don't necessarily consider myself a believer in the paranormal. But on the other hand, with experiences like this, how do I deny it? I think I just maintain a healthy, neutral perspective. But I hope by telling this story, I can have solidarity with other people who have experienced things at the worst parts of their lives as well, and maybe, just maybe they can find some comfort in hearing someone else say that they aren't crazy, that what they experienced happened. It can't be explained. There's no way to speak around it, there's no way to move past it. It's just a part of you, and that's okay. That's valid. To stay up to date with True Scary Story, get our free newsletter. The link is on our website, True scarystory dot com and in the description of this episode. This episode of True Scary Story was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhezwindel, a VW sound scheduling by Bianca Chavez, an additional production by me Edwin Kovarubias and the Scary FM team. If you're following the show, We'll be back next week with another story. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.