Scary True Stories Told In The Rain | Ep. 481

Scary Stories and Rain

A chilling collection of true, personal horror stories narrated over ambient rain sounds, blending psychological tension with real-life eeri

Key takeaways

• The mind can create intense fear from ordinary household sounds, especially in isolated environments.

Main topics

• Psychological horror
• Urban exploration

Notable quotes

"I just work at a local coffee shop now. It's the only way to stay sane."

Conclusion

The episode underscores how fear is deeply personal and often rooted in

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, welcome to Scary Stories and Rain. Do you want to listen ad-free? Just subscribe on Spotify for $2.99 a month. Now turn out the lights, enjoy the stories, and enjoy the rain. Speaker 1 (0:15) Most people don't even believe me when I tell them, but I have a job where I work from home. People in my area mostly work with cars or in the medical industry. There aren't many jobs where I live. Thankfully, I was able to land a decent paying job that let me work from my home office. It definitely comes with its struggles, but it is hands down the best job opportunity available to me right now. It isn't always perfect. It definitely comes with its pitfalls. Sometimes you have to sit at your computer even when there isn't any work to be done. It's also very easy to get distracted. But I think my biggest problem has to do with the house itself. It's kind of creepy. The house itself is an old Victorian. Like really old. We're talking mid-1800s. A family friend owned the house and sold it to me for a very fair price. Basically gave it to me. I was super excited because it meant I got a nice big house to live in by myself along with my girlfriend. I'm a natural loner and don't really care for social interaction. So I had a nice big house all to myself and girlfriend and a job where I worked from home with very minimal social interaction with other people. That was basically my ideal life. But the house's age meant that it was going to be scary at times. And I don't mean with ghosts or anything like that. But sometimes, I hear the house settling or making noises that I can't explain. I've actually had quite a few instances where I'll be sitting down and doing some work, and then out of nowhere, I hear a noise that I just can't rationalize. I go exploring throughout the house, only to find that nothing has changed. It's as ominous as it is frustrating. I did what just about anyone else in the world would do. I started to use background noise to drown out the disturbances. First, I tried those quiet instrumentals on YouTube. You know, the ones that last five hours and they're supposed to put you at ease or something. It didn't really work for me because I couldn't get my computer to be loud enough to drown out all the noises. It was also not very good at keeping my attention. There was one week where my work was really slow and there wasn't a whole lot to do. I still had to sit at my computer though. There was an understanding that I was allowed to basically do anything I wanted, as long as I was available to my coworkers if something came through that needed to be done. I didn't quite know what to do with this time and just started watching documentaries on YouTube. It actually was pretty fun. I learned a lot. So, that next week when things started picking up again, I just instinctively turned on a documentary. I wouldn't be able to have all my focus on it, but it was a lot better than having some ambient noise. It actually helped distract me from the sounds of the house. I guess I just didn't have enough mental focus energy to notice any of the other sounds going on around me, if that makes any sense. Well, It had been about two weeks of me watching documentaries while I worked. Everything seemed to be good until one Friday morning. I start work at 8, and this must have happened around 10. I was sitting at my office chair working, while I listened to a documentary about a 9-11 conspiracy theory, when all of a sudden, I heard an abrupt banging noise coming from upstairs. Like I had said, I hadn't been distracted by any noises for a while by this point. So, the fact that I noticed this noise meant that it was probably serious. My fight or flight kicked in. You might laugh at me, but when I work, I keep a knife next to me. I ran upstairs with the knife and looked around for any suspicious noises. The banging had stopped, and I didn't know where it had come from. I knew what section of the house that I heard it from, but there didn't seem to be anything out of place. I stood there for a few moments, and then I heard it again. It happened right on the other side of my door. I immediately braced myself for there to be some kind of animal or something trying to get in. I didn't really know what to expect. I opened my door to see that the screen door had not been properly closed. My girlfriend didn't close it all the way when she left for work that morning. It was also pretty windy that day, so it was just going back and forth. causing a banging noise when the wind got bad. This was kind of a breaking point for me. I didn't want to live my life in constant paranoia and fear of some kind of attacker coming into my home. We live in a safe area. There's never been a serious threat, and I have run around my house with a knife way too many times now. I honestly felt kind of stupid. So I made a decision. I was no longer going to assume that someone was breaking in if and when I ever heard a sound. I put the knife in my dresser in my bedroom and decided that I was just going to be into work while I was working. Except for my documentary, of course. So, there I was the next week. It happened on a Wednesday. I was sitting in my office doing exactly what I had set out to do. I was working, ignoring the noises, and listening to a documentary. I remember the exact part of the documentary I was on when I heard it. The sound was the loudest sound I had heard in the house up to that point. At first, I reassured myself that it was nothing and that I need to fight against this paranoia. The sound continued, and I couldn't take my mind off it. After about five minutes of listening to what sounded like rummaging and walking, I went upstairs to check. Bear in mind, I didn't have any weapon on me, and I was expecting some kind of reasonable explanation. When I got to my kitchen, I saw that the front door was wide open. The cabinets were all open, and there was a strange man rummaging through them. I didn't notice until after the fact, but he had been eating something. I remember screaming at him. I don't remember what I said, but it was something to the effect of, What are you doing in my house? Then he just ran off. Didn't say a word. He took a loaf of bread with him, but I don't think he took anything else. Other than what he had eaten before I came upstairs. I reasoned with myself that he must have been a homeless man or something. I don't know why else you would steal a loaf of bread from a very ordinary looking house. This was the worst thing that could have happened. On some instinctive level... It had proved all my worst fears right. There was some kind of danger in my house. And of course, it was the one time when I didn't have my knife on me. I lucked out that he didn't try to hurt me or anything. But it was still horrifying to see nonetheless. I just work at a local coffee shop now. It's the only way to stay sane. Speaker 1 (7:55) Back when I was much younger, my friends and I were into urban exploring before it was even really a thing. We grew up in a pretty rough area, with a lot of old apartment buildings that had to be abandoned, and eventually demolished due to asbestos. That stuff made them basically fireproof, but where fire and smoke will kill you quick, asbestos will kill you slow. But try explaining that to a bunch of teenagers. actively looking for somewhere to hide from grown-ups, so they could do some distinctively grown-up things. Where other people saw a decrepit, dusty crap hole, we saw our own little corner of paradise. A home away from home. Or maybe home is too strong a word, but you get the idea. Anyway, there was one particular estate that was almost completely bereft of inhabitants. having been gradually relocated by the city council until there must have been no more than two or three families left over. It was like an actual ghost town. Even the local corner shop had its shutters permanently down, with a for sale sign quickly following its indefinite closure. But like I said, that kind of place was our bread and butter. So when they moved out, we moved in. There was this one set of high-rise flats, That means apartments, to you North Americans, that we used to visit on the regular. The heating and other utilities had been switched off for a while, and this was in the middle of winter, so we used to stash cans of cider in the old cupboards, and they'd basically act like walk-in fridges. It got to the point that we ended up occupying one of the flats, bringing over an old nylon string guitar and other amenities so the place felt a bit more homey. So this one night, just after Christmas, about five of us pile into the old place to get drunk and have a sing-song. I remember that we were halfway through Bowie's Man Who Sold the World when the off-key twang of a string breaking had us all groaning with disappointment. What's more, it was the G string. Anyone who knows anything about playing a guitar will tell you, break a top or bottom string, and it's not the end of the world. but break your G-string, and nothing quite sounds the same. So there we were, basically condemned to a silent disco for the night. But it didn't dampen our spirits entirely, so we committed to staying for a few hours to at least make the most of the evening. We are all just sitting around, chatting bollocks and bumming smokes off each other, when one of us loudly hushes the rest of us, before holding a single finger in the air, as if to say, Listen. There's a brief silence, and I do mean silence. No one heard a thing. So the lad who had shushed everyone just put it down to him hearing things. The mood softens again quickly, and we're back to drinking and hanging out. Only a little while later, the same lad does the same hushing thing. He's not alone this time though. Another one of us swore that he too had heard something. A scratching or shuffling noise coming from the dark corridor outside the flat. If you have one lad with an attack of paranoia, it's easy to forget. If