Be Careful Where You Visit

After exploring a supposedly haunted house, a boy’s life begins to unravel in horrifying ways. As strange changes take hold of his body and mind, he struggles to keep the darkness at bay — but some things, once invited in, never leave.
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Scary Story Podcast. Be careful where you visit,
for you might be marked. These things won't leave you,
They'll merge, they'll twist into you, and will they ever leave?
My name is Edwin and here's a Scary story. Robert's

(00:21):
mom said, no, we couldn't hang out with each other.
That was the first sign. Robert and I had known
each other since kindergarten and our parents were friends. We
both went to the same high school, and we were
the only ones in the whole place who were into
boom Picks, a little known trading card game thing, except
that was online. We still hung out, though, but I

(00:42):
could tell that something was off when I look back
at it now, after this whole ordeal has finished, I
think he just felt guilty. I stopped going to school
some time in November, and Robert showed up to my
house one afternoon. I could hear my mom talking to
him about me in the living room. When I stepped outside,

(01:02):
they both looked at me and shocked, and then remembered
it was just me. Slowly relaxing their shoulders. What's up, man,
Robert said, My mom didn't go toward the kitchen or
her room right then. Like she always did. She sat
down on the couch as Robert and I talked a
little bit. What was new at school, everything had been
going and what was coming next. Everyone thought I was

(01:25):
sick until the incident at school. Suddenly all the talk
was about Robert and I the weirdos of the place.
But Robert didn't care. He had always been the strange
kid and he was the best. I don't remember when
he left. Suddenly it was morning again at my house,
the bed sheets completely soaked and some of the blankets

(01:47):
on the floor. Mom looked exhausted as she sat on
the kitchen chair that was now in the corner of
my bedroom. I could sense relief in her eyes when
she looked at me and then looked at her phone.
She held it up to her ear, waited a little bit,
and then she said, he's awake. She nodded for a
few more seconds and then hung up. I felt tired, No,

(02:10):
not just that I was in pain. My arm felt
like I had been broken and then put back together.
My legs felt like this stretched out too much lengthwise.
You know that point when you stretch her arms and
you go a little too far. But that was my
whole body I was thirsty, sticky from all over, and
there was a strong smell that I can only describe
as sewage in the summer. Mom walked over to me

(02:34):
and held up my back, grabbed a glass bottle of
water on the night stand and brought it up to
my face. I chugged the whole bottle so fast I
even hit my teeth with it. They dripped down my
cold shirt. Mom didn't seem to care. She looked at
me the way she would look at a stranger at first,
before asking me what was the last thing I remembered.

(02:56):
I was talking to Robert in the living room, right
or was it getting ready for bed? No, that was
the night before. Her arms dropped back down to her lap,
and she looked at me the way she used to.
She put her hand on the back of my head
and then reached for my legs to bring them forward
toward the edge of the bed. The towels and a

(03:16):
new change of clothes was ready for me in the bathroom,
she said. She gathered all of the blankets and sheets
on a big pile on the floor. Robert was a
smart kid, and though I am positive now that he
was warned not to tell me anything he found a way.
Had a few messages on my phone from him, confusing

(03:37):
at first, then I got it. He was asking about
what I knew, what I had been told through the
information of packs that was just a collector card from
Boom Picks. I had to tell him the truth based
on my status, which again this is all game speak.
But I answered in the best way I knew. After all,

(03:57):
I could say anything I wanted. It was him the
one that had to watch out for what he said.
I told him that I started feeling tired and then
fell asleep, that it was part of my illness, the
reason why I hadn't gone back to school. I thought
of many things, like how old people begin to lose
her memory maybe I had that, or how my hair

(04:17):
had been falling off for so long that I thought
it was cancer, not knowing of course, that's not how
it works. As far as I knew, I wasn't undergoing anything.
I was taken to the doctor just one but I
remember the look of disappointment in my mom when he
told her that there wasn't anything wrong with me, at
least nothing he could see, and recommended a psychiatrist. Mon

(04:40):
Nevor took me to a second appointment with her. I
kept scrolling through Robert's messages, eventually finding the image of
the cards The Truder Twins, the Rosary, and the Bimitar,
the Lord of the Underworld. I tried to scroll deeper
into the messages, but I hit some type of limit
in the chat and couldn't go further. I knew Robert

(05:01):
was trying to tell me something and not get in trouble.
Considering how Mom didn't even let us talk in the
living room as normal, I thought that maybe he had
resorted to this our secret language of the card game.
With this card, the Truder Twins. There were two characters
that Robert and I most related to. They were some

(05:21):
of our first cards. The story behind them is pretty cool.
Their two brothers, who are ghost hunters, both brave. One
of them, the one that Robert would be, was the
technical guy, a professional hacker and computer wizard. The other
was a historian, sort of like an Indiana Jones type
of guy, an expert and adventure Together they would visit

(05:42):
haunted places and use science to communicate and solved mysteries.
We even went on a ghost hunt once. All because
of the ghost hunt, I'd forgotten all about it up
until this point. That's when it clicked. A friend of ours,
a freshmen we met during one of the active shooter
drills at school, had told us about the Robertson house

(06:04):
was near the end of the street. His name was Beaman,
and I'm not sure where the name was from, but
it fit him. The kid's dad worked for the county
and had done an investigation on the house, saying that
several reports had come in about weird stuff going on
in there. That's about as far as we got with it.
But the librarian at our school had a whole other story,

(06:27):
and that's how we learned about county records. They have
rolls and rolls of scans of newspapers, some that were
recently digitized, and we could search for them like a Google,
only with history of the county and the surrounding areas
all in one single computer. Robert typed in so many things,
anything from murders to ghosts and hauntings. But it wasn't

(06:50):
until he got to sacrifice the word itself that he
made a connection to the house. Kids from our high school,
from class somewhere in nineteen ninety one one in nineteen
ninety two had gone in there. There had been reports
of animal sacrifice and human remains being found at the place.
The police reports were vague, and I'm not sure if

(07:11):
that's the way they were made back then, but they
described things pretty bluntly, pentagrams, candles, and blood stained walls,
something out of a Stephen King novel, to quote one
of them. The place was cleaned up, left abandoned, and
that was that. But why were we talking about this? What?

(07:31):
Thirty years later? Calls? Police officers had been getting calls
from the house despite it having no active phone line.
An investigator first did a story about this in the
local newspaper. He had looked into it a theme for
a Halloween article sometime in the two thousands. I found
that the telephone company blamed the calls on a false

(07:53):
address input, maybe someone using that address by mistake, or
the lines being configured incorrectly to begin with, before all
of the lots around the place itself started construction. In short,
it had all been fake, and yet it was still happening.
But what we cared about was that the idea of
an old house was just what the Truder twins would do.

(08:17):
Robert and I spent weeks trying to figure out how
we could go in there and establish contact, and that
I think we eventually did. I can pinpoint when everything
started if I go back to that exact place. The
evening at the Robertson house. It was dark but completely intact.

(08:39):
Nothing seemed broken or missing. The supposed rooms where the
pentagrams and blood was supposed to be didn't even look
like the ones in the pictures, and for a little
bit I thought we had gone into the wrong house.
Robert and I walked past the living room and toward
the staircase. In the standard Truder Twin style, get to
the top first so you can lay out the plan

(09:00):
and position yourself. And so we got to the top
of the staircase and everything felt wrong. The house wasn't
decayed the way you would expect a place like this
to be. It was no graffiti, no broken windows, The
walls were clean, yellowed from time, but intact. It smelt

(09:22):
like dust and wood and something else, something sour that
clung to the back of my throat. We moved the
way we had always planned. We split up, covered ground faster,
just like the Truder Twins wood. I watched Robert disappear
into a room on the left. I headed toward a
hallway where the doors were half shut, crooked on their hinges.

(09:45):
I picked the last door on the right. It opened
with barely a sound. The room was empty except for
an old dresser with a cracked mirror sitting on top
of it. The mirror caught my eye immediately. I don't
know why, but I moved toward it like something was
pulling me in. The glass was warped, blackened around the edges.

(10:09):
As I stared at myself, I noticed something shift in
the reflection, something just over my shoulder. I turned around.
Nothing there. When I looked back at the mirror, That's
when I saw it properly, a figure standing right behind me.

(10:31):
It wasn't shaped exactly like a person. It was too tall,
too thin. Its face, if you could call it that,
it was hollow except for the eyes. The eyes were
just open wounds, red, angry, wet, and watching me. I
couldn't scream. I wanted to. I tried, but my throat

(10:52):
locked up tight, like a hand was squeezing it. The
smell hit me then. It was stronger than before, a
gut wrenching stench of rotten meat and something sour sweet,
like a bloated carcass left out in the heat. The
thing raised a hand, or maybe it was his whole body,
leaning forward, and it touched me. And there wasn't a

(11:17):
flash of light or a noise or anything cinematic. There
was only blackness, like slipping into ice cold water. The
world simply disappeared. When I opened my eyes, I was
outside the house. Robert was next to me, breathing hard.
His hands were on his knees, like he'd been running

(11:38):
or trying to shake me awake. You didn't say anything,
and neither did I. He walked back home without a
word between us. I thought maybe he had gotten scared,
maybe I had too. Maybe he had fainted and Robert
had pulled me outside. And I wanted that to be
the answer I needed it to be. But in the

(12:01):
deepest part of myself, in a place I hadn't even
known existed until that night, I knew something else had happened,
something I wasn't ready to face. I told myself that
night meant nothing. At The blackouts, the cold, the figure
in the mirror, all of it were tricks of my mind,

(12:22):
and it worked for a while. At home, things weren't
exactly normal. But they weren't bad either. Mom didn't ask
me about the house. She didn't even seem to notice
that I'd been gone that night, though I knew she
must have. She started leaving glasses of water by my bed,
like I was a sick person who couldn't get up.

(12:42):
I told myself it was just motherly worry. But soon
the dream started. They weren't dreams like you're thinking, not
full knots stories. There were places, endless, rotting halls, shadows

(13:06):
that followed me without a sound, doors that I couldn't
open no matter how hard I pulled. Sometimes I would
wake up biting the inside of my cheek hard enough
to bleed. Sometimes my sheets would be twisted so tight
around my body that it looked like someone had tried
to tie me down in my sleep. Then my body

(13:26):
started changing. It was small at first, nails darkened at
the tips like they had been dipped in ink. My
hair thinned faster than it should have for someone my age.
No matter how much I showered, the sour smell clung
to me. Once I looked at my arms in the
mirror after a bath, I saw tiny marks running up

(13:49):
my skin, like little scratches, almost too perfect to be accidental.
They stung when the water touched them. Robert stopped, I
mean by. After that, he didn't visit. He barely message
except for once one line sent late at night. Don't

(14:10):
answer if he calls. I didn't know what he meant
not then, and it got worse. One evening, I was
eating dinner with Mom when she dropped her fork onto
her plate and stared at me. I stopped chewing what
I asked. She shook her head slowly, her mouth trembling

(14:31):
a little. Nothing, honey, just tired. But she wouldn't look
at me the rest of the night. The next day
she called in someone I knew because I heard her
talking softly downstairs, whispers, urgent ones. And when I peeked
through the window, I saw a tall man getting out
of a car, was holding a warm black book under

(14:52):
his arm. It wasn't dressed like a priest. Something about
him made the hairs on my arm stand up. He
looked at the house the way a soldier looks at
a battlefield. When he entered, he greeted my mom quietly,
and then asked if he could talk to me alone.
I didn't want to. Something deep in me twisted and

(15:14):
hissed at the idea, but I agreed. The man pulled
up a chair across from me, setting up the book
on his lap. Tell me about the night at the house,
he said. I opened my mouth, but the words tingled,
they were caught. I couldn't say anything real. I talked
about the stairs, about the dust, about feeling dizzy and faint.

(15:37):
But I didn't mention the figure in the mirror. He
listened carefully, nodding. His hands were steady, his eyes sharp,
and after a long pause, he leaned in closer. Sometimes,
he said, his voice low. We see things were not
meant to see, things that remembered for us. Afterward, he

(16:03):
tapped the book once with a heavy finger. Do you
remember the face? It felt like my skin tightened all
at once. I did, of course I did. Eyes like wounds,
skin that wasn't skin at all. They hold where a
mouth should have been, And so I nodded. He flipped

(16:24):
up in the book without looking, that was already marked,
already waiting. He turned the book around to show me
a picture. It wasn't a drawing, it was an actual photograph,
old cracked at the edges, a blurry crooked snapshot of
a thing that should have never existed, the same figure

(16:44):
from the mirror, and underneath, written in hand so old
that the ink had almost faded, a name one, and
I couldn't even read off its letters blended, and yet
I knew exactly what it was. In that moment, the
pastor closed a book and placed a hand on my shoulder.

(17:05):
You've remarked, he said, not accusing and not scared, just
stating a fact marked possessed. I thought the pastor would
do something after that, an exorcism, a prayer, something, but
he just looked at my mother and she shook her head. No,

(17:27):
she said, quietly but firmly, We handle our own. The
pastor tightened his jaw, but didn't argue. He simply closed
a book, tucked it under his arm, and patted my
hand once, like I was some poor broken animal. That
was the end of it. No prayers, no rights, no

(17:49):
blessing of the house. The shame settled over everything like
a heavy wet cloth. After that day, nobody talked about it,
not at home, not anywhere. Mom acted like nothing had happened.
Chickok meals, made small talk, asked me how I was feeling,
without ever looking me in the eye. If I mentioned

(18:10):
feeling strange, the tiredness, the cold inside my bones, the
strange reflections and mirrors, she would just smile too tightly
and say you're better now you're home. But at school
it was worse. Word must have gotten out somehow. People
looked at me sideways, like I was carrying some kind

(18:31):
of infection that didn't want to catch. Even teachers treated
me differently, overly polite, careful around me, like I might
break into screaming if they said the wrong thing. Robert
was gone. At first they said he was sick, and
then he said his family moved. Nobody knew for sure.
I sent him a few messages. I called them sometimes,

(18:52):
but they stayed on red and he never answered. Eventually,
as a count just disappeared, and Mom didn't even want
to reach out to their parents. It was weird, just
like he just vanished. It was like everyone wanted to
erase the whole thing. I tried too. For a long time.
I try to pretend it hadn't happen, that I hadn't

(19:13):
seen those bleeding eyes in the mirror, that I hadn't
felt something move inside me, something cold and old and hungry.
I almost believed it some days, and so I would
catch my reflection in a window, or the back of
a spoon, or a dark puddle on the street, and
I would see it, not my face, his smiling with

(19:39):
a mouth that wasn't there. I think that's why Mom
didn't push for more. She knew. She knew that even
if we try to forget, even if we built a
whole life on top of the thing that happened at
the Robertson house, it would still be there, just beneath
the surface, waiting. You can pay over rot, you can

(20:01):
cover a hole in the floorboards, but eventually everything falls through.
I don't tell anyone about it now. I don't even
say his name out loud. I know what it is.
Sometimes I wonder if I made it worse by writing
all this down and telling it to you. I don't
think anything will happen if I don't say his name.

(20:24):
Sometimes I hear a phone ringing at night, one that
is in ours. Sometimes when I close my eyes, I
see him, smiling, patient, waiting. And it's been that way
for years now. There are days longer now than before,
when I feel almost normal. I go to work, I

(20:47):
come home I wash the dishes. I call my mother
once a week, even though we never talk about anything real.
I even laugh. Sometimes it feels like living almost, But
there are cracks, little ones. At first, the dreams came

(21:07):
back a few months ago, not the dark halls or
the endless doors. New ones. Dreams where I'm standing over people.
I love my hands shaking something heavy and sharp in
my grip. Dreams where I'm smiling. I can feel that
it's not my own muscles, though pulling at my face.
Sometimes I wake up standing beside my own bed, nails

(21:30):
digging into my palms, blood trickling down my wrists. The
mirror in my bathroom has a crack now. I don't
remember how it got there. At first, there was just
a hairline fracture, barely visible unless the light hit it
in a certain way. But now it's a spider web
across a whole glass. When I look into it, my

(21:52):
reflection stutters like a bad video feed. And sometimes, just
sometimes I see two of me, one standing just a
little behind, smiling. I can feel him closer now inside
my blood, inside my breath, coiled around the place where
my voice lives. There are things I want to say.

(22:14):
I want to scream, but every time I open my mouth,
I feel his hand clenched tighter. He doesn't want me
to tell not yet, maybe not ever. I think that's
the final shame. It's not just that I let him in.
It's that I learned how to live with him. I
made a place for him. And when he finally decides

(22:35):
it's time, when the crack finally splinters all the way through,
no one will even be surprised. They'll just say they
always knew something was wrong with me. And the worst
part some nights, when everything is dark and the world
is quiet and no one is watching, I smile with

(23:06):
Scary Story. Podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Komarugyas.
If you know of someone who also likes scary stories,
let them know about this podcast. I'll also be uploading
every story to our YouTube channel, so you can send
it to them that way. If you wanted to read
a story on my other show, a real one, like
if something that has actually happened to you, you want
to send it to me via email and it might

(23:27):
show up in a future episode of that other show
called Paranormal Club. I'll link to it in the description
of this episode and responding to Ciena's comment on Spotify
about the story idea, I think we do have a
story where we feature sapphire Sandalo called Picture on the Wall.
That might be the story you might be suggesting. I'll
link to it as well. Anyway, thank you very much

(23:48):
for listening. Oh please go find me on my new
podcast called Paranormal Club. Keef it scary everyone, see us soon.