The Locked Door - Scary Paranormal Tales

Can't sleep? Welcome back to another bone-chilling episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast. This is where your deepest nightmares come to life. 

Tune in for a mix of spine-tingling horror fiction, terrifying paranormal encounters, and bone-rattling true crime stories that blur the line between nightmare and reality. We'll dive into the darkest corners of the supernatural, from ghostly sightings to otherworldly encounters that will leave you frozen in fear. These stories will haunt your mind far longer than that weird noise in your attic. We'll keep you on the edge of your seat, with your heart racing, as each tale tightens its grip on your imagination. After listening, we'd love to hear your thoughts—leave a review on your preferred podcast platform and let us know what sent shivers down your spine.

Subscribe so you don't miss any of the horrifying tales we have coming your way. So, sit back, unwind, and brace yourself for a chilling experience. Keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams... 

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
I hadn't meant to kill my sister, and it had
been a joke in life. She never used to listen
to me anyway, though as her older brother, I felt
I had the authority. But after she died, and in
my childish misery and guilt, I'd invited her to come
back home. And while she did, there were only two

(00:35):
of us. Our parents thought we were everything they'd want
in a family, a boy and a girl. She came
out a bit shyer than they wanted, quiet, and a
bit odd, at least to me at that age, but
we were perfect side by side in family portraits. Now
there was only one of us. We don't take family
portraits anymore. It started when I found the key to

(00:59):
her room. Our bedrooms were across the hall from each other,
on the second floor of the house. The doors had
old fashioned doorknobs that locked with a key, which we
didn't have, in which I hadn't seen before then. One
day I found a ring of unmarked keys and a
drunk drawer in the foyer side table. I went around
trying them in everything until I'd matched every key to

(01:21):
a door in the house, including our bedrooms. Nearly every
key on the ring had a spare, but not all did.
The key to my sister's room was one of them
that had only one master key. That was when I'd
gotten the idea. I pocketed the key to her room
and left the rest in the drawer where I'd found them.

(01:43):
I waited for the perfect opportunity. That evening, when she
was in the living room with my parents, staring at
the TV as she always did after dinner, I went
upstairs on pretense to use the bathroom, and quietly locked
her bedroom door from the outside back downstairs. I acted
innocent as we watched TV together. I loitered until my

(02:04):
sister yawned, kissed our parents good night, and went upstairs.
I waited on the couch, grinning with suspense. It was
a good long moment before we heard her shriek, then
the sound of a wood banging. She streaked downstairs in tears,
asking for help with her door. Father went up with
her to see what was the matter. They both came

(02:25):
downstairs again, her still in tears and he in confusion.
It's locked, he said. Mother got up and retrieved the
keys from the side table in the hall. All three
of them went upstairs. I waited until they were gone
to fall over myself laughing, pretending to find something funny
on TV. And by the time I got sleepy and

(02:46):
went upstairs, they were still there in a huddle, trying
and retrying every key. Of course, none of them fit.
Mother suggested my sister's sleep in my room until they
can call a locksmith in the morning. I was annoyed
at this and produced the key from my pocket, too
tired to care about the trouble i'd get into. It
was just a joke, I said in my defense. After

(03:09):
we'd gotten her door unlocked, Mother made me return the
key to the drawer, saying the first chance she got,
she'd get it duplicated to avoid this situation again. Naturally,
she'd forgotten that weekend, when our parents were out on
an errand leaving us alone at home. I'd gotten bored

(03:29):
and done it again. My sister knew immediately who had
done it. It was a Saturday afternoon, and it was
the last time I would see her alive. She flew
into the kitchen, chasing me, demanding I opened her door.
I pretended to have swallowed the key. By this time,
she was in hysterics and fled the house in tears.
As if she could run all the way to mommy

(03:50):
and Daddy in town. This wasn't the first time she'd
done that. She always came right back home before she
got to the end of the street. I waited for
her to give it up and return, but as the
hour turned to two and then three, I began to worry.
I waited by the chair close to the front door,

(04:10):
and then the window. At some point I'd gone out
and walked around our yard and then the neighborhood, but
saw no sign of her. I came home with my
heart and my throat. I decided to keep waiting instead
of calling my parents from the kitchen phone. Ten minutes more,
I told myself then I would. At some point I

(04:32):
must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew, it
was later than late. My parents were home, shaking me
by the shoulders as if they wanted to kill me.
The first thing I noticed was that they too were
in tears. My sister had run out into the road
and gotten hit by a car. Our parents had just
turned the corner on their way home when they saw

(04:54):
the ring of people in the flashing lights. She had
been found on the road two blocks away from home.
Farther than I dare go on my own. When the
ambulance took her away, the sirens were silent. There was
no rush. She was dead. My parents had come to
find out whether I was dead too, and I think

(05:14):
at that point they wished I was the first chance
I got. I left them crying and hugging each other
in the living room. I went upstairs to her room
and unlocked the door, and then just stood there staring
at her empty bed. Her ballerina music box threw a
weird shadow on the pillowcase from the moonlight outside her window.

(05:37):
I carried the key in my pocket during her funeral.
My parents barely looked at me, and I wouldn't blame them.
They had hardly spoken to me in the day since
her death, except in harsh little commands to hurry up,
get dressed, fix your tie, get in the car. I
behaved like the perfect sun they'd always wanted, but that
did nothing to warm them up to me. Because of

(05:59):
their avoidance of me, I managed to find myself alone
at some point in the ceremony, looking into the open
casket of my dead sister, cold and pale and dressed
up in her ballerina costume. I felt the key burning
in my pocket, where I kept my hands pocketed and clenched.
I brought it with the key and went to pat
her cold marble hands as if to say goodbye. I'm sorry.

(06:25):
As I did, I tucked the key under her fingers
folded together over her chest. Please come home, I whispered.
I didn't cry then or after. Mother kept making her promises.
She was too grieved to go through my sister's room
and put things in order after the funeral. She promised

(06:46):
to do it someday, just not now, not now. She
only went as far as to stand in the open
doorway and glance in the way I'd done the night
my sister had died. But invariably Mother would break down
into tears and leave, closing the door behind her. Sometimes
she stood there until father took her away. I didn't

(07:08):
dare go near her. She repeated this pitiful ritual almost daily,
and then every week she stopped. After a couple of
months of this, things edged into a semblance of normalcy.
My parents softened up toward me just enough to allow
me to have friends over. I needed someone to talk to.
My friend Keith came over after school one day, and

(07:30):
I told him about how the previous night I'd woken
in bed hearing the faint sound of my sister's ballerina
music box playing in her room across the hall. It
stopped as soon as I'd fully opened my eyes and
sat up. I decided it was a dream, but the
melody would not leave my mind all day. At school,
I hummed the tune for Keif, who had the inane

(07:51):
idea that he knew the composer of the song. We
fell into a debate about that, and to refresh his
memory of the song improve my point, we went up
to were room to retrieve the music box. The door
was locked. We peered into the key hole and found
that it was too dark for that time of day.
Then I realized why there was a key blocking the hole.

(08:13):
It had been locked from the inside. Keef saw no
significance to this, since I'd been too struck dumb to
say anything else to him. I had been in no
mood to entertain him after that, so he went home.
I stayed downstairs in the living room, staring wide awake
at the TV without watching it, waiting for my parents
to come home. I could hardly restrain from calling my

(08:36):
mother to hurry home from the grocery store or my
father from work. But when they did finally get home,
I found I could hardly mention anything to them. I
stayed quiet all through dinner until it was time for
me to go upstairs to bed. I didn't want to go,
but I didn't want to upset my parents further. I

(08:56):
stopped outside my door and glanced at hers across the hall, silent.
I didn't dare try to knob again. It was a
Saturday the next day and I was off school, but
I was woken early by my mother battering the door
to my room. I'd gotten my own key from the
drawer and locked my door the previous night, something I

(09:17):
rarely did before. Then, when she'd gotten in, she demanded
that I unlocked my sister's door that instant, that I
had no right to. I interrupted and told her I
had nothing to do with the door this time. Lies.
She shrieked, you and your friend were fooling around in
the house yesterday when I was not here. I told
her that was true, but we never did a thing

(09:38):
to my sister's door, and that was the truth. She
wouldn't believe me when I said I didn't have the key.
I was forced to tell her that I'd left it
in my sister's coffin. She'd gone silent at that, not
because of the implications of what this meant, but because
she was transported back to the funeral in her mind.
Her eyes filled up, but the tears would not fall.

(10:01):
I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I thought
the key was in the house now on the other
side of the door. All she was thinking about, now
that she shook herself into reality, was that we couldn't
duplicate a key we didn't have. What's more, she decided
the door wasn't locked, but merely jammed by humidity or
something else. Aft punishment for her for not having opened

(10:23):
the door in a while, she decided we would have
to call a locksmith that very day. Once she flew
this idea by my father, however, he would have none
of it. He left his breakfast half eaten at the
kitchen table and roared out to the garage to retrieve
his toolkit, and roared back in and straight up the stairs,
followed by my mother, rolling her eyes behind his back

(10:46):
as he spewed forth his wounded pride gingerly. I hung
back in the hall as my father began to play
locksmith at my sister's door, with me and mother watching
over his shoulder. He tried the door this way and that,
pulled and pushed, banged it with precision here and there,
and finally knelt at the doorknob and probed a pen

(11:06):
light into the hole. I saw his eyebrows shoot up.
There's something blocking the keyhole, he said, confirming what I
had seen the other day. It was mid morning by then.
My sister's room had a window facing east. The light
should have shone through the doorknob, as it did from
the gap under the door, but it was dark as night.

(11:28):
Through this gap, my father slid a sheet of old
newspaper along the floor, a good deal of a centerfold
to cover as much ground as possible. Then, with a
thin metal instrument from the screwdriver kit, he prod it
into the hole until we heard a thin, distinct thud
of metal on the paper. On the other side, a
dot of light was cleared in the doorknob. My father

(11:51):
pulled at the paper carefully from under the door, and
we could see the slight weight of the key keeping
the paper from flapping, But then before it was halfway out,
the weight was gone, and the paper came clean away
on our side of the door, very suddenly, unburdened from
its weight, the key was gone. Father had that puzzled

(12:12):
look on his face, and he turned a glance through
the doorknob. Then he got on all fours to peer
under the door to see if the key had gotten
caught on something, or had somehow fallen off the paper.
But of course he saw nothing, no movement of shadow
across the light, no telltale form of a key on
the floor for any distance. I knew what had happened.

(12:34):
Of course, ed had been plucked out from under our
very noses. Mother asked Father if he was quite finished
playing locksmith, so we could call a professional. It wasn't
quite ready to give in, and as they continued to bicker,
I left them and went downstairs out the back door.
I circled around the yard to look up at my
sister's window from the outside. They had picked her room

(12:57):
very carefully. Not only had she gotten the best view,
but the window was the most secure from any break
ins from the outside. You couldn't get to its ledge
from the roof or any outdoor piping. There were no
tree branches close enough for a foothold. This side of
the house was smooth and unscalable. And as I stared
up at her open shutters and drawn curtains the way

(13:20):
they had been the last day of her life, I
saw that the window panes were intact. Nobody had gotten
in from there. Looking carefully and for as long as
I could stand, I detected no movement or a light
from the dimness behind the curtains. When I went back in,
my parents were in the kitchen, now taking a break,

(13:41):
it seemed, from trying to break the door open, but
not a break from their bickering. They shut up at
once almost as soon as I entered, and when I
heard it, I shut up two, a great silence descending
on us. Three as from the top of the stairs
we could hear my sister's ballerine music box playing the
way it did when the lid was opened. I was frozen,

(14:06):
but barely a second later my father dashed up the stairs,
eyes wild. My mother called after him in affright, but
then followed him. After barely a moment of hesitation, I
was drawn upward as well, as though by magnetism though
I wanted to be nowhere near that room. I found
my father at the door, one hand on the still

(14:27):
tightly locked doorknob and the other rapping sharply on the wood,
calling who's there, and no response. My mother had her
mouth covered in both hands, suspended between shock and grief.
No matter how much they'd demand an answer from an
assumed stranger as my father did, or changed attack and
called my dead sister's name as my mother did, nothing

(14:51):
stirred from the other side of the door. The music
box had stopped playing. By the time I'd gotten to
the top of the stairs. It seemed we stood there,
holding our breaths for a good half minute or so
before my father stepped back from the door and took
my mother's elbow, leading her downstairs. He gestured with his

(15:11):
head at me to do the same. Downstairs, they spoke
in hushed funeral voices, wondering at what was going on.
I couldn't bring myself to say much, and for once,
my mother showed real concern toward me. She had me
sit down at the kitchen table while she got me
a glass of apple juice to revive my energy. Afraid

(15:33):
i'd faint, I noticed my reflection in the chrome body
of the toaster oven pale as Ah. I didn't dare
say the word, even in my mind. We stayed downstairs
for the most part. At some point my father went
out to look at the window the same way I'd done,
and had come back to report to my mother the
same things I had observed. My mother asked again whether

(15:56):
we should call a locksmith, but I could see her
resolve had des and so had my father's. It didn't
seem all that keen to be the locksmith either. At dinner,
my mother asked me, as if she had just remembered,
whether I had really left the only key to my
sister's room in or coffin. I nodded my head just once.

(16:19):
I was sure I had, but I didn't want to
be sure anymore. Mother asked nothing else. Father wondered if
calling a priest was more appropriate. Then my mother gave
him a dirty look. Everyone knew that priests always failed
in the movies. And besides, neither of my parents were believers,
not in God, not in ghosts, not in anything. I

(16:43):
wasn't sure they believed in me when I said the
key was buried with my sister, but that lack of
belief kept us all suspended in a swirling and tortuous meaninglessness,
where the only meaning that now presented itself was a
dangerous one. They let me sleep in the room that night.
This helped my nerves somewhat. Though their bedroom was technically

(17:05):
right next door to my sister's with a wall in between,
while mine was directly across the hall from hers. I
didn't mind as long as I wasn't alone. I don't
know how they managed to get to sleep, or if
they were pretending as I was, but at some point
during the night I was lured out of my drifting
at the sound of the music box playing softly, as

(17:27):
if to itself down the hall and just on the
other side of the wall. The next day, we all
gave the room a wide berth and tried not to
speak of it. We tried to get on as normally
as possible, but there was something very odd about the
house now, like we had an evil secret that we
had to keep, even from each other. Every now and then,

(17:49):
the music box would start playing from the top of
the stairs, usually when we were downstairs, and never a
few bars at a time before it stopped again. Whenever
it did that, we would all go quiet instantaneously. Mother
would go white and rigid, her eyes filling up, and
Father would reach for her hand and hold it tight.

(18:09):
I would go over to sit beside them, and Father
would put an armor on my shoulder. I almost thought
this was a good thing, to have that room occupied
once more, but I couldn't bring myself to be grateful.
It was I who had asked her back, after all,
but I dared not confess that part. As soon as
silence returned, we would take a few seconds and then

(18:32):
carry on as if nothing had happened. But we could
not fool each other. We were shaken. My parents refused
to talk outright about how they felt, but I thought
I understood since I felt the same way. Instead of
feeling any warmth for my sister's memory, there was only
a cold dread, and around her door there was a
sense of bitterness that chilled anyone who wandered too close,

(18:56):
even in the humid warmth of the day. We kept
this up for the next few days. No matter how
late I tried to dally after school instead of coming
straight home, I would always be the first one in.
My parents were trying to stay away as long as
they could too. But by the middle of the second
week of this, my mother decided what it was. They

(19:17):
had to call a real estate agent. We were going to
sell the house and move out, but things had to
get worse first. I'd found myself and my pent up
distress mentioning something about the door to my friends at school,
and Keith invited himself home with me to check it out.
I knew my parents would be away from home, but

(19:38):
I didn't want to go back alone, so I agreed.
I hung back a good few steps. When Keith climbed
the stairs to the bedrooms, he walked right up to
my sister's door, as if he hadn't felt the miasma that,
at least to my parents and I had grown stronger
every day. Keith tried the door as I knew he would,
and found it locked, as I knew he was. Then

(20:01):
he bent at the waist and peered through the keyhole,
his other eyes squeezed shut for focus, and his whole
body shuffling him side to side a few inches at
a time to get a better look. I stood across
the hall, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. Then I
heard a reassuring sound of the front door opening and
my mother coming in calling my name. Before I could

(20:24):
answer her, though, Keith jolted back from the door, gagging
and clutching at his throat. His face was pale and strangled,
his eyes wide and unseeing. He couldn't scream, but I
screamed for him, and my mother was upstairs in an instant,
just in time to see Keith collapse on the floor,
writhing and twitching. As my mother rushed attend to him.

(20:46):
I threw a glance at the doorknob, nothing but a
point of light, and under silence. We had taken Keith
to the er, left him there with his family, and
got back home in time to tell my father when
had happened. Keif had swallowed his tongue and would have
choked himself to death if my mother hadn't acted so quickly.

(21:06):
The overseeing physician had assumed it had been some sort
of accident caused by surprise or an unfortunate posture. Something
I hadn't really been listening. My mind was torturing itself,
trying to imagine what he must have seen that made
his body recoil so violently as to strangle itself. I
wanted to ask Keif myself desperately, but his parents wouldn't

(21:30):
let me near him anymore. Meanwhile, my parents were throwing
themselves into the search for a new place to live.
We knew now that we were in a dangerous situation.
Over the next few weeks, we had terrible luck selling
the house. The agents we got kept asking about the
room and why we wouldn't unlock it, and the few
people who showed up to the open house had a

(21:52):
bad feeling about that room. They assumed we had something
to hide, and they were right. No matter how beautifully
we are presented the rest of the house, that room
poisoned the atmosphere, even though from a photograph of the
second floor you couldn't quite tell there was anything off
about it at all. The house was listed as a
three bedroom space, and people expected three bedrooms. My father

(22:16):
thought we should just promise to get the door fixed
before they moved in and then just let them do
whatever they would with whatever they found behind it, but
my mother argued with them over the ethics of it all.
By this point, my parents were willing to just abandon
the house and leave it to some in laws. They
were not fond of They had planned to move into

(22:38):
what was supposedly a summer home, but with the idea
that we would settle there. It was smaller, less comfortable,
and farther from my school and my father's workplace, but
it didn't matter. By then, we only had one goal
between us, get out. The music had started to drive
us half mad. At night, sometime during the last week,

(23:00):
the music box had broken, and the tiny mechanism began
to play just one note, over and over again, one key,
one key, over and over, and then it went quiet again,
so suddenly that the silence was just as loud as
anything before or after. To call it music was to

(23:23):
call whatever it was on the other side, My sister,
it might have been music at some point, but now
it was a mere sliver of what it had been
in life. Now it was a hideously shrunken fragment of
the whole, distorted and sharpened so it was no longer
recognizable as a part of the original, And it was
getting louder and louder, and it appeared to be moving

(23:46):
along the walls. My parents' bed, which I slept in
with them, was positioned so that our feet were pointing
to the wall that divided the master bedroom from my sisters.
That used to comfort me somewhat, knowing that this was
the farthest we could get from it and from wow her.

(24:07):
But it had gotten so that it seemed the music
was seeping into the walls like a pipe had burst
and bled into the paper. The paint on the walls
seemed to shift in my mind's eye. In the half light,
we were all unable to fall asleep until dawn, and
our daylight lives were thrown out of rhythm. We stumbled home,
exhausted and stayed on guard all day, hearing that one

(24:29):
key play on and off throughout the afternoon and evening,
and then we stayed keyed up all night to repeat again.
The next day. We were fairly at the end of
our rope. My mother insisted we move within the week,
and drove us like slaves to finish packing up while
she saw to the logistics of getting boxes and furniture

(24:49):
shipped off. We were even more strung out and exhausted
by then, and thanks to that I must have drifted
off that last night before we were to move. Right
there on the the bear mattress and the master bedroom
with nearly all its contents in cardboard boxes. I woke
up to hear the music over my head and right
beside my ear. I snatched myself away immediately and saw

(25:14):
that my parents had done the same. The music that
one demonic key was throbbing louder than usual through the
wall opposite from my sister's bedroom where our headboard was.
The broken note played again and again, traveling and swelling
and surrounding us till today. That one key played in

(25:36):
isolation on a piano can trigger a horrible case of
nerves in me en f sharp I think it was.
My parents were up in an instant, scrambling to get
dressed and yelling at me to get moving as I
sat there frozen. They had to yell because the music
was so loud now it was impossible the neighbors would
remain undisturbed by it. The moving company we hired was

(26:00):
scheduled to come by and help us the next morning,
but we had to get out right then, at half
three in the morning. My father said we would return
later to help the movers if they showed up, but
for now we were going to a nearby motel with
nothing but an overnight bag hastily thrown together, we rushed

(26:20):
out and piled into the car, noting as we left
that the music had been thrumbing throughout the house, even downstairs,
but it could not follow us out the front door.
As soon as I cleared the doorway, the air came
easier to my lungs. I hadn't known we had been
literally suffocating in that house all this time. From the

(26:42):
yard and then the garage. Pulling out from our driveway,
our house was as silent as anything should be at
three in the morning. While my father backed the car
down the driveway, my mother nervously scolded him all the
way to watch the mailbox, and I twisted around in
my seat. I looked back at the house one more time.

(27:03):
We were pulling down east and I had a clear
view of my sister's window from the back of the car.
The shutters were still left open, and there was no
light from the depths of the room, which I could
clearly see now that the curtains were thrown open, and
standing there in the gap of the curtains, I saw
a pale ballerina at the window, watching us go