The Pattern of Fear: An Abandoned Doll, Haunted Homes, and the Unknown

True Scary Story

A chilling true story from a listener recounts decades of unexplained paranormal phenomena beginning with a mysterious white light seen as a chil

Key takeaways

• Unexplained childhood experiences may foreshadow lifelong paranormal encounters.
• Shared perceptions of 'being watched' by multiple people in the same space suggest collective psychological or environmental phenomena.

Main topics

• Unexplained childhood phenomena
• Haunted homes and environmental anomalies

Notable quotes

"I've played that tape to other people too... everybody kind of comes to the same conclusion that it's like someone whispering, get out."

Conclusion

The story ends with an open question: whether these experiences stem from psychological factors,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm Harvey Guillen and this is Killer Stories. Every Monday I'm cutting the lights. Except these stories are all real. We're talking brazen heists, devastating cons, serial murders, and cases that defy tidy categories. So join me for new episodes of Killer Stories with Harvey Guillen every Monday. Speaker 2 (0:31) Hi, Edwin here. If you're a fan of true crime that's chilling, eerily real, and deeply unsettling, I think you'll love Red Handed, the multi-award winning true crime podcast hosted by Saruti Bala and Hannah McGuire, enjoyed by 4 million listeners each month. Every week, Red Handed unpacks different murders, disappearances, and criminal conspiracies with razor-sharp research and the depth that each case deserves. Red Handed is the UK's number one true crime podcast, dropping new episodes three times a week. If you're looking for a place to start, I recommend the recent episode on Cajun cryptids, the mysterious creatures lurking in the Louisiana swamp. Follow Red Handed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, and tell them I sent you. Speaker 3 (1:24) At first, I couldn't hear anything except for this static a little bit. But then I'd start hearing something, this weird, far away, sing-song voice calling my name. Speaker 2 (1:38) Decades of encounters, impossible coincidences, and one terrifying attempt at an exorcism make this one of the most unsettling personal accounts we have received. My name is Edwin, and here is Sarah's true scary story. Speaker 3 (2:02) I've had unexplainable experiences as far back as I can remember. The first one that I remember is when I was seven years old. I was home alone. My mother was still working. I'd come home in the afternoon after school was out. I was a latchkey kid, I guess. I remember getting myself a snack, and I had this weird feeling like there was something in the hallway. Our kitchen branched off from the main hallway that had the bedrooms. I remember poking my head around the corner to look in the hallway and I saw this large, bright white light that was as tall as the ceiling to the floor go from my room right across from my room, which was my parents' bedroom. I just saw it move. Speaker 3 (2:59) I remember I wasn't scared. I was just like, hmm, what was that? I ran over to look in my parents' bedroom. I didn't see anything and I didn't see anything in my room, but I don't think I ever told my parents though. My mother Speaker 2 (3:11) is Speaker 3 (3:12) kind of religious. She'd never really liked to talk about supernatural things. So we wouldn't really talk to her about those things. Speaker 3 (3:25) The next big thing I would say was when my mom remarried and moved. We moved to this new home. This was a brand new development block right near a cemetery. Used to be cornfields, but who knows what it was before then. I think one important thing to know is that this was in the Midwest, and in the Midwest there's old Native American burials. It wasn't uncommon for people to find arrowheads in their garden. It was a brand new house. The people who had lived there before, it was a young couple. They hadn't even lived there a year, so it seemed like a great deal. My parents just assumed that they had bought above their means. But we found out. We kind of watched the whole little neighborhood do quick rotations. They'd put homes up for sale again and again. Within like a year or two, no one really seemed to stay for long. And terrible things seemed to happen to everyone. Happy couples would move in and move out in just a year, getting divorced. Healthy people would move in and get cancer or die. There was a father across the street who actually shot himself after living there for two years. Mind you, there were only like 10 homes on this block, and it was in a really nice neighborhood. It was like a bit more expensive to live in, in a small village, not even a town, so middle of nowhere. So it was just kind of like odd all these terrible things were happening. Speaker 3 (4:49) Long after we had lived there, I started noticing a lot of spooky activity. One of the things that I felt right away was that when we would be in the living room, which was just next to the entrance, you would always get a feeling that someone was watching you from that area for some weird reason. I know it sounds strange, but it always felt like that. And I would have friends, you know, because I'm in high school, I'd have friends come over and do sleepovers. No one would actually want to stay at my house because they would always say the same thing. They'd be like, I feel like something's watching me. I would never tell them my experiences because I wanted them to hang out with me. I didn't want to tell them, hey, my house is haunted. But they'd always seem to come to that conclusion that like that weird feeling that something's watching me from the hallway. It would freak them out. So nobody would ever want to hang out at my house. But it also kind of felt validating because everybody had the same feeling as me that there was something watching us from the hallway. We had a storage area in the basement of the house, and sometimes my brother and I would hear scratching noises. We had cats, but they were kind of like slow scratches. You know, cats often, there's a certain speedy rhythm to it. It's not really slow. That always kind of freaked us out, hearing that scratching noise, and so we never actually checked it out because it was in this big, dark room. Speaker 3 (6:28) My brother had told me that sometimes at night he would hear someone in the room almost and like a heavy breathing sound, but he couldn't see anybody there. We would try to tell our mom some of these things that we were experiencing, but she never really wanted to hear it. She didn't want to believe it. So we just kind of kept it to ourselves. We actually didn't even tell each other that we were experiencing these things until like a few years later. I think both of us kind of were worried like that we were going crazy. Speaker 3 (7:02) But once we started like talking about it and sharing like, yeah, these things are happening to me too. We tried to do like EVP, electronic voice phenomenon, set up a recorder in the basement, pressed record, and then left the basement, came back. And we actually, within a couple seconds of that tape, which was brand new, we could hear what sounded like this deep whisper saying. Speaker 3 (7:32) I've played that tape to other people too. Didn't tell them why we recorded it or where it was recorded or what was on it, just to see like get their unbiased take of what do they hear. And everybody kind of comes to the same conclusion that it's like someone whispering, get out. So it's kind of freaky. After living there for like a year, I moved my bedroom to the basement to get a bigger bedroom and kind of away from the rest of the family. That's when I started experiencing a lot of sleep paralysis. I would wake up at night in the middle of the night. I wouldn't be able to move, but I could see this like shadow entity standing at the foot of my bed or at the doorway to my bedroom. There was one really scary incident when... Speaker 3 (8:26) having the sleep paralysis and I could hear two of them whispering in my ear saying terrible things. I can't even remember what they were but I just remember feeling absolutely terrified. Speaker 2 (8:41) There was another experience Speaker 3 (8:43) in the basement where Speaker 3 (8:46) I got that feeling that I was being watched. I looked up and I saw what looks like the silhouette of a person, but it wasn't a shadow person. It was like you could see through it. It was transparent, but it was kind of like shimmery, kind of like on a hot day when you're looking down the road and it's kind of shimmery at the end because of the heat. It looked like that. So really weird. Speaker 3 (9:09) It looked like it was like walking towards me. I was totally terrified. I ran up the stairs. I went outside in the sun because this was like maybe two in the afternoon and just stayed outside for a while. Later on, I had a boyfriend and he was in the basement waiting for me, I guess, to watch like TV. He had ran up the stairs and said, he described the same thing, this like transparent human shaped like entity. Speaker 3 (9:38) I had never told him that I had seen that in the basement, so that also felt kind of validating that. Okay, I'm not crazy. Other people are experiencing this too. The scariest thing that ever happened was when I was home alone. I think my parents and my brother were off on some like sports thing. So I was home alone and I had taken a nap in the afternoon. Speaker 3 (10:02) I ended up sleeping quite a bit. When I woke up, it was nighttime. It was dark. And I didn't have any lights on, of course, because it was light out when I had started this nap. But when I woke up, I woke up to this sound of scratching. And I could hear what sounded like from the other side of the sofa, the back of the sofa, was this scratching noise. But again, like we have cats, but this was a super long, slow scratching sound. Cats don't make that noise. I remember laying there absolutely terrified because I'm home alone. I can hear the scratching sound. What is that? I was scared to turn around and look, but I felt like I had to like get out of there before something would happen. So I remember just waiting until I could shoot up and like run into my room and like shut the door. And I just left the lights on for the rest of the night in my room. Speaker 3 (10:59) Several