Four Dark Figures: Hauntings in the Midwest

From a childhood marked by horrifying sleep paralysis, to encounters with ghostly apparitions and unexplained phenomena in historically haunted locations like the Granger House in Marion, IA—this is not a tale of a single haunting, but of a life shadowed by the unexplained.
Thank you, Aiden, for sharing your experiences with us.
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Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhees Wendel from VW Sound
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
And I look up and I see these four figures.
The face area was so dark, I just couldn't see
a face even when the headlights went in that direction.
I kind of looked at him and I'm like, did
you see that?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
In homes across Iowa and Illinois, Aiden has faced chilling
in encounters with the paranormal, from terrifying sleep paralysis to
unexplained footsteps and face to face meetings with the unknown.
My name is Edwin and here is Aiden. It's true
scary story.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
My name is Aiden. I'm originally from Illinois, a little
small town called Warsaw that's spread across the border from Iowa.
But my mom was a teenager. They would play the
Ouiji board and my grandparents house. They've had some interactions

(01:09):
here and there, light flickering, running up the stairs, knocking
on doors, but as far as I know, they've said goodbye.
Everything's been fine. When I was little, we weren't as
well off as most other people. We kind of found

(01:31):
ourselves jumping back and forth from house to house. I
was living at my grandparents house at this time. My
dad told me a story right before I was born

(01:52):
two thousand and three to two thousand and four. He
was staying in the house with my mom. They were
really young. He would have his clock on top of
the TV. When he woke up in the morning, you
could see what time it is. He said, he'd always

(02:13):
wake up and the clock would be flipped turned totally
around to where the time and everything he couldn't see.
It got even more interesting when he said that sometimes
he'd be in the bedroom and you would hear like

(02:37):
legitimate running up the stairs. Mind you, this is an
older country house. The stairs are gonna be kind of
loud when you're running and walking up. When you run
up the stairs, you go down this hallway. There's one
room at the top of the stairs, and there's two rooms.
If you go down the hallway, there's one to the

(02:58):
left and one in the right. You'd hear the door
slam upstairs. He'd come downstairs ask my grandparents, were you
guys coming up and down the stairs. My grandparents never
really ever go up the stairs. My grandma go up
and down occasionally unless she's cleaning something or whatever. And

(03:22):
I don't remember last time my grandpa has ever actually
been upstairs. But that kind of brings it to my experience. Now,
this would have been around two thousand and nine, twenty ten,
I would have been four or five years old. I
had this room where you go up the stairs of

(03:45):
this two story country house. You would go down the
hallway to the left, and that would be my bedroom.
I know, even as a kid, going up and down
them stairs, I always have to turn the light on
because I always felt this weird energy. It was almost ominous.

(04:11):
Something was definitely watching me tight. So even like at night,
I have to turn the light on to go up
the stairs. Even now, I would always sleep with my parents.
I never really knew why. My mom would always tell
me that I would be scared and that I would

(04:33):
go and sleep in their room with them. I guess
now this makes sense because after what I seen. I'm
almost twenty years old now and this still scares me
to this day. My grandpa, I would always go out
with him on these late night drives. He had this

(04:56):
air refreshener hanging from his mirror, a grizzly bear with
red eyes. It always freaked me out. It kind of
made fun of me for it a little bit. I
try not to think about it. It's pretty traumatic. So

(05:23):
there's this one night where I was having this dream.
Like I said, it's a country house. You go outside,
there's going to be an open field to the east
side of the house, large open cornfield. You can see
quite a distance I want to say a quarter mile

(05:45):
distance probably, But in my dream this looked different. There's
a gravel road that runs along the end of this cornfield.
You can see it run along. But in my dream
everything was very very dark, like if you're in a

(06:08):
really really dark space, like your eyes are covered. It
was the blackest black like I've ever seen. I go outside,
there's this tree line. All of a sudden, this doesn't
look like my grandparents house. I can look back in
my dream and I'm like, okay, well, I'm at the

(06:31):
front porch of this house. I'm looking off. You see
the trees, you see the outlines, but you can't see
the trunk of the tree. You're not seeing the leaves.
It's just the whole outline, and they're all black figures.
Like it's so weird, but you can only see, like

(06:52):
the sky as just a lighter color, just barely let
you see it. So I'm looking out there and then
I see these figures running along this tree line. You
see these red eyes in the distance, glowing red blood

(07:16):
color of just bright bright red, just running and running,
and you can tell that they're big bears. They're running
along this tree line and then they run up close
to me. They're running and they're running, and then all

(07:38):
of a sudden, there's tons of them, maybe forty fifty,
these dark figures. They were all bears with the red eyes.
You could not really see their facial features. You could
tell that they had their heads, just the little round ears.
They're on all four legs, and they were all dark, dark,

(08:04):
black figures. And in my dream, I'm scared. So I'm
kind of making my way back into the house, into
the front door, and I'm looking out the window and
I can still see them emerging up to this house.

(08:24):
One had just put its pall on the porch. And
then that's when I woke up. It was so scary.
I don't understand. I'm trying to process the dream. But
when I woke up, I realized I couldn't move. All

(08:46):
I could do was look around my eyes. I could
hear myself breathing, and I'm trying to like scream almost
because I'm like, why can't I only see with my eyes?
And my eyes and I can't move there as my
body and you could hear like the nastiest snarl of

(09:11):
a bear. It's mad, it's growling. And you could hear
the huffing and puffing echoing down the hallway like it
was coming from where my room was, and everything just
went quiet. There was a hallway light on. The door

(09:35):
was barely cracked open to where you could see the
light come through, but the room was still very dark.
You see this black cloud like mist emerged through this
door and pop up into this figure. It was a bear,

(09:57):
just like I'd seen in my dream, and it was
the darkest dark I've ever seen, piercing red eyes. You
could see its ears, you can see its head shape.
You could hear it breathe and just like huff and

(10:17):
I'm seeing that real heavy animal like breathing. It just
stood there at the foot of the bed and it's
two piercing eyes, just sitting there staring at me. I
don't know what this thing wanted from me. I think
I just wanted to scare me. I just sat there
and stared at me and this thing, I want to say,

(10:39):
it's about ceiling high. It got down and you could
hear its two front palls hit the floor like there
was an actual animal in there, and it just got down.
This thing walks up to the side of the bed

(11:01):
or whatever, and you can hear it breathe and huff
and puff. And it had gotten up about a foot
away from my face. You could see its claws if
that were on. Its paws just kind of go onto
my mom's hand and it reached like way in and

(11:25):
all I could hear was like this exhale, just huff.
After that, it disappeared, gone into thin air. I still
can't explain it to this day. Right after it left,
I can move, and I tried waking my mom up

(11:48):
or whatever, and ton I'm like, hey, hey, I seen
this in my dream or whatever, and she's like, Oh,
it's okay, just go back to sleep. We'll talk about
it in the morning. I want to say, I probably
didn't sleep for a couple hours after that, and finally
i'd fallen asleep and told her about it the next morning.

(12:11):
And my grandparents they're kind of skeptics when it comes
to ghosts. They're not total believers in that kind of stuff.
My dad and mom they have their own separate stories
they've seen things, so they're kind of like, it's okay,

(12:33):
it's just a dream, It's okay. It was horrifying. I've
never seen anything as scary as that night. Oh my,
kind of getting the chills now just talking about it
because I can see it. The energy upstairs does not
feel right. When you go downstairs, everything's fine, you know,

(12:56):
there's family, the energy's cool, it's lifting, but just something
about that upstairs is just eerie. We actually had ended

(13:22):
up getting a house. I was probably about six seven
years old. Now this house was it was a small,
decent house, but it had a very large yard, which
was awesome. There's rumors about this house. Kids would tell

(13:44):
me like, oh, there was this guy that hung himself
down here, and I don't know if they're trying to
scare me or that's creepy, but okay, in that house,
I can't say I've ever really seen anything in that house,
but like, you would definitely feel a presence downstairs at night,

(14:08):
and you would hear these weird clicking noises or tapping
on things. It was always cold. I don't know if
that's just basement being a basement or that place. It
was always eerie. Nothing was really like crazy crazy in

(14:30):
that house, but it was off fast forward. It moved
into the second house. This one pretty big house. It
had an upstairs attic that was finished that my parents
would sleep in. I slept downstairs. This is an older house,

(14:54):
so you know, you got your wood floors, big, big
dining room, kitchen. The basement was really old and unfinished.
I never actually found out how old this house was,
but I'm assuming it's at least bill probably early nineteen hundreds,

(15:15):
kind of by the way, the woodwork was really simple house.
I had this night where I was just doing my
own thing in the living room. I was up really late.
Let's say it's a weekend. I'm a kid. Everybody in
the house they were asleep. It was probably twelve o'clock,

(15:36):
one o'clock in the morning at least. I was just
kind of sitting there watching TV, sitting on the floor
in the living room. All of a sudden, you hear
these footsteps. I mean, this is a good sized dining room,
it's wood floors, it's echoey. I hear these footsteps. I

(16:00):
went towards me, and they sound like these large work boots.
You can hear the heel hip first and then the
front of the foot, one step after another, and it
was loud like I had thought my dad had came
in or something after a work shift, because he worked

(16:22):
at a foundry at that point in time, so he
had really large work boots. They were steeled to work boots,
and it was like loud, and I was like freaked out.
I ran upstairs and the moment that I realized, I
looked into my parents' bed and both of them were
there sleeping. I was freaked out. My prior experiences, I

(16:49):
have seen things. I had seen that one thing, and
I have heard things. I want to say, that was
the second that holds the crown for a second right there.
That was horrifying. Just hear something like approaching you, but
you can't see it. We had our last house and

(17:11):
this was twenty fourteen to seventeen. There's a four four
way intersection there, a really small one and it was
at the corner of this intersection. This is a nice
two story house. Older house, really creepy basement and how
it was built. I would sleep upstairs, my parents sup downstairs.

(17:38):
So if you walk in, the stairs are to your right. There.
The first thing you see other than the living room
to your left, and then straight down that hallway that
leads to the kitchen, and then their bedroom to the
left of that hallway. I had some weird, weird things happen,
Like I'd be sleeping at night, all of a sudden,

(18:04):
I had this little speaker tower. I would wake up
and it would fall over. There's no no way this
thing just falls over. Just to make sure I had
this done, like a second time, I made sure this

(18:26):
thing it was standing up. I made sure like there's
nothing around it, nothing to make this thing fall over.
Went to bed that night. My phone was on this
It's almost like my body just knew to wake up
at that moment in time. But right when I woke up,

(18:51):
I just watched this tower straight up just fall right over.
Face first. I heard my screen protector on my phone.
It freaked me out. I ran downstairs being as little
told my mom. I'm like, mom, mom, my speaker tower,

(19:12):
like it just fell over. I don't even know what's
going on, Like it just fell over all of a sudden,
and it's freaking me out. He was like, Okay, that's fine,
you can sleep down here with me or whatever. I
don't even know how to explain that that was the
weirdest thing. Fast forward again here in Iowa, Cedar Rapids.

(19:43):
I went to the well known Ranger house. This thing
is known for being haunted. You hear things at night,
kids running, things being moved. You hear that clang and
knock at the horse barn door. You hear that open

(20:06):
and shut. I skeptical first, so I go there. I'm
there with my aunt and we stayed there before the nighttime.
We had this guy kind of showing us around the house.
He's like, I got these ghost readers and everything. This
is like what we found in this house. These weird

(20:27):
figures that you can see. They're like shadowy figures. You
can see them in like the corners of the house.
So like you'd hear the water turn on, like when
we were in there. How does the water just turn
on while me and this guy are like just talking.
Everything in this house. I swear they just kept original

(20:50):
from the eighteen hundreds. They're said to be like the
first settlers of Iowa in that region. They had some
things happen. The Grangers and their kids got sick and
they had died. Mister Granger and missus Stranger. They ended
up passing away from some illnesses. At the time. We

(21:14):
go out to the horse barn. We're looking around. They've
got the carriage still in there and the chain links.
We're talking and then all of a sudden, you hear
the door shut behind us. And it's like a big
old barn door. You could hear them like kind of

(21:36):
slap against the wood when you close it. That's what
we heard. We heard the door shut and those things
like slapped against the door. Nobody's there, nobody's around the door.
They were kind of looking at each other like, Okay,
this is a little weird, like what is going on here?
We keep going on. We go into the night and

(21:57):
we're kind of just sitting in this living room with
this high a couple of my aunts with the spirit box,
and we were trying to make out some words. It's
kind of hard to make out some words under that,
but we heard a couple of names, David or like
how is he? Or where is he? But the weird

(22:21):
part was the little boys room, which is upstairs. It's
a two story house. You go up to his room.
It's the first one the the left of these stairs.
They kept a piece of hair of his in there,
which the spirits make attachments to things like this. I

(22:41):
think that little boy is still in that house. We
was up in that room, me and one of my
aunts before we had went to bed that night. We
had decided that we were going to put a flashlight
down and we were going to ask the spirit if
they could dimn this flashlight. Oddly enough, the flashlight like

(23:05):
actually dimmed. We set it down facing up towards the
ceiling and you could actually watch it dim down, and
it got solo to the point would almost shut off,
and then it turned back on like just all of
a sudden. I'm like, there's new batteries or whatever in
this flashlight. Like how we're trying to go to bed,

(23:31):
you hear like something walking throughout this house really light,
and it freaked us out. I ended up falling asleep.
My aunt said, say, like two three am. She said
she was awaken. She could hear the footsteps of people
walking in there, and nobody was awake at this time.

(23:56):
It felt really cold in there. I didn't notice it
at first until I, like I actually thought about it.
I'm like, it is cold cold in this bedroom, Like
this is weird, So this makes sense. There's got to
be something in here. This was Schoeyville, Iowa, two weeks ago.

(24:29):
Me and my friend, my best friend, actually I had
to drive around listen to music. We're driving into this town.
We get down to these houses. We come around this curve.
It's his house, a very dimly lit driveway. It was

(24:55):
pitch black outside. It was dark. My headlights were on,
all that kind of stuff. This driveway was very very
dim had the two brick pillars at the end, but
it was super dimly lit, but lit enough to where
you could see enough down there. We come around this curve.

(25:18):
We're listening to music. We're like, we're into it. And
I look up and I see these four figures. They
look like if they were newish clothes, like just like
a sweatshirt like thing that weired me out. Though that

(25:39):
I noticed is they were all the same height, and
each and every one of them, all four of them
were just staring right at the vehicle. You could tell
they were staring in our direction, but the face area
was so dark. I just couldn't see a face even
when the headlights like went in that direction. I paused,

(26:01):
like I trucked the music off. I kind of looked
at him, and I'm like, did you see that? There
were four kids standing there? They look like maybe they
were trying to scare us or whatever. And he kind
of turned back around. He's like, no, I didn't see that.
He turned around and looked at the dryway and nobody

(26:21):
was there. Of course, like I'm thinking I'm crazy now
because he's not seeing this. Oh Lord, don't make me
feel like I'm crazy now. He's like, dude, I didn't
see anything back there. I don't know what you're talking about.
I think they're just kids trying to scare us. They're

(26:42):
just standing at the end of the driveway. But not
even a couple of minutes later, we turn around. I'm like,
I want to go back. He's like, I don't believe you.
I'm not seeing nothing or whatever. And there's this dip
down from the road right next to these people house.
There's like four or five trees just in a perfect line.

(27:04):
We're driving by. I see it again and it's just
one of them as time, maybe I want to say,
about like six foot tall, standing there with they had
their hood up over their head. I could not see
their face again. They just stood there behind that tree,
just barely so I could see them poking out. I'm like,

(27:25):
look now there's something there, and he looks over and
then this thing is gone. It had literally just disappeared.
I had looked over there for a little bit. I
didn't see anything run away. I seen nothing. We had

(27:47):
went past his house four or five times after that,
and I seen nothing, and neither did he. I did
not know how he could not see that. To me,

(28:07):
they were clear as day. They looked like they were
just kids trying to scare us. But no, they were gone.
Even when I looked back and he's at the four
that were there the first time he looked back, they
were gone. You would have thought he would have seen
one runoff. You thought he would have seen the four

(28:30):
if he would have just looked back and seen him.
But no, didn't see him whatsoever. It is totally impossible
for them to just not be there when he looked
back right after I said that, and them just not
be there, like you're not moving that fast without somebody

(28:51):
seeing you run across the driveway through the woods or
something like that. Like there's just no way their most
death was something there that day. I'm still thinking about that.
Is there a meaning to this. Why did I see
four all about the same height beings is staring at

(29:13):
me when I went around this corner. I'm still trying
to figure it out. I don't know why I seen
what I seen. I've had some pretty interesting moments, for sure.
When I see these things, they're like random, like they
just just happened, Like it just all of a sudden.

(29:36):
In that moment, something wants me to see it, and
then I just don't see it again after that, like
I don't understand.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
To share your story with us, fill out our form
over true scarystory dot com and if you want me
to read your true story instead. I am looking for
submissions for my new podcast, Paranormal Club. Just email me
at Edwin at scarystory dot com. That's E d w
I n at scarystory dot com and type in paranormal
Club in the subject line so I know that it's

(30:18):
for that. And if you haven't checked it out yet,
it's available on YouTube and wherever you're listening now. This
episode was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel
of Vwsound, with additional production by me Edwin Karubias and
the Scary FM team. Thank you very much for listening,
Keep it scary, everyone soon