The Last Hug

In this emotional episode, we get a glimpse into Enrique’s life after death of a parent. From signals around the house that show us that they’re still with us, to a newfound appreciation for religion, we get to hear what helped his family when times got dark.
Enrique’s Family GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-grandma-uncles-after-losing-home-in-eaton-fire
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You can find Edwin on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram as @edwincov
Editing and sound design by Sarah Vorhees Wendel from VW Sound
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
In this emotional episode, we get to hear about life
after death of a parent the many signals that show
use that they're still with us. My name is Edwin
and here is Enrique's true scary story.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
My family has always been like super religious. It started
off with my grandma passing down her beliefs to my mom.
My grandma was always the one that would carry around
the little prayer book with her and her rosaries. She
would stay with us sometimes or she would stay with
one of my theos uncles and aunts, so we got
used to her being around. The earliest memory that I

(00:51):
had would be in the first house that we ever
lived in. It was the only house that we lived
in until the fact it got burnt down in the
wildfire recently this year. I want to say it might
have been like two thousand and five, when I was
about like nine years old. My little brother always used

(01:13):
to sleep walk and sleep talk in that house. It
was both my parents, my mom and dad, my little brother,
and my older brother. Me and my brothers would share
one room. Meanwhile, my parents would have the room next
to us, and the three of us were sleep together.
I remember one night my big brother woke me up

(01:34):
around I want to say, maybe two three in the morning,
and he was asking where my little brother was at,
and I told him I don't know. He then points
out to me like he's okay, I watch this. He's
going to be in the kitchen and he's going to
start crying and he's going to say he saw someone
standing behind him. And right when he finished saying that,

(01:57):
he goes five or three too, and when he gets
to one, he points towards the kitchen. He started crying
from the kitchen. My mom and dad all wake up,
like everyone's up at this point, and we all go
run to the kitchen to see what's wrong. And he's
just standing there like still like half asleep and crying.

(02:21):
And once we finally get him to calm down and
I'll tell him, tell us what happened. He tells us
that he saw my grandma behind him that had just
passed away I want to say maybe two years ago.
He said that she was reaching out towards him. That's
when I turned towards my older brother and I was like, what,
how do you know that? He said that he Later

(02:44):
on that day, he had told me that he had
a dream that my little brother had gotten up in
the middle of the night, slept walk to the kitchen,
and the only reason he saw that shadow is because
he saw my little brother open the fridge while he
was still asleep, and that he saw like this shadow
figure standing behind him. I feel like the ouse has

(03:07):
always been like the fives, or the energy has always
been weird, because electronics would randomly turn on. I remember
for a couple months straight, my parents' TV would turn
on in the middle of the night. This was back
when it was like the big box TVs, and it
would just randomly turn on to a channel that was

(03:28):
just static, and it would be full blast, full volume,
and they would wake everyone up. There would be random
times where we would be sitting in our rooms and
then we would just hear something fall or something drop
from the kitchen. My dad would stay outside in this
garage where he had his own TV, and he would

(03:49):
stay out there to watch his baseball games. It would
have been getting dark already at this point, so maybe
about seven or eight ish, I was inside alone watching
YouTube on my phone. I had my earbuds in and
all of a sudden, I start hearing like this deep
like labored breathing. If someone was having trouble breathing like

(04:10):
a smoker's breath because my dad used to. My mom
tells me that. She told me he started smoking around
like maybe eight to ten, so he started smoking really
young because they were born in Mexico and they came
over here. So after the first two times, I thought, oh,

(04:33):
maybe it's the video that I'm watching, so I rewind
the video. I pay extra attention to the video, and
then I don't hear it. So I'm like, okay, whatever,
I just go to the next video. Not even a
minute or two minutes later, I hear it again, and
at this point I'm thinking, like, oh, it's my dad.
He's he came in from his baseball game like he
would usually do, to come in and get some water

(04:55):
and then go back out. But I didn't hear the
door open, so I thought, oh, maybe it was like
a part of the video that just blocked out the noise.
So I get up and go into the kitchen. I
check everywhere, and I don't see him. So I go
outside and go into the garage to check on him,
to see if he had come in to try and
maybe scare me or prank me, because we have that

(05:16):
kind of relationship. I hear that the TV is still
on before I even get out there, and the baseball
game's on, and he's just laying down in his launchair
that he would watch the games on, and he was
like knocked out cold. He was snoring, passed out, and
I was like, Okay, it couldn't have been him. So
I go back inside. I lay back down on the sofa,
and I go back to watching my video. After the point,

(05:40):
I had forgotten about it and I had started to
relax again, I hear it again, and this time I'm
annoyed because I want to find out what's happening. So
I take out my earbudt and I just stand up
and say, whatever the hell's happening stop. I sit back down,
go back to watching my video. I start relaxing again,

(06:01):
and then I start feeling like all the hairs on
my body on the back of my neck just start
to stand up and prickle. And right as that starts
to happen, I feel like this icy cold hand grab
the back of my neck hard. I jump up, scared,
like thinking, oh, my brother or my mom had gotten
back and they like were playing with me. When I

(06:23):
get up, I turn around and there's no one in
the house, like nothing at all. I'm looking down in
my arm like even now I'm all my hair standing up.
I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. But it was
this icy cold hand, like if you had just left
your hand in a bucket of ice and water for
five minutes straight. When I told my mom this, her

(06:46):
way of joking about it was telling me that it
was my grandma to try and tell me to stop
being like a dumbass. That the house has always felt wrong,
and I want to say it might have been reason
that my parents were always arguing and getting into fights
and stuff like that. This was another time that I

(07:07):
was home alone and my parents were outside talking and
I was inside, like in my room, cleaning up the
room and like fixing things. Their stereo in my mom's
room turns on and it's like pretty loud. It turned on,
and like later on, I ended up telling my mom
because she heard it turned on, and she was asking
me if I was in her room, and I was like,

(07:28):
I went in there to see if you were in
there turning on the radio because it turned on loud.
Later on, she ends up telling me, like, you know
how that radio turned on that was your grandma's favorite song,
and I was like, dude, what Because when she had passed,
I was pretty young. I want to say, I was
like maybe seven when she passed, and I remember that

(07:51):
night that we went to go visit her in the hospital.
It was like one of the windiest days here where
there were palm trees like getting ripped out of the ground.
It was like really windy. But that night is like
something I still remember. Eventually, as I grew up, my
parents did fight a lot, and my dad ended up

(08:11):
telling me that he was tired a bit and he
was going back to Mexico with the money that he
had been sending over there to build the house, that
he was going to stay over there, and that he
wished es the best of luck. So he left me
and my little brother at this point, because my older
brother had already got married and moved out. He left me,
my little brother, and my mom there to pay the

(08:33):
bills of the house. He would still come and visit,
I want to say, maybe twice a year, or whenever
he had to have a doctor's visit for his medicine.
Whenever he would come back, my mom would always joke
about like how he would have witches or like who

(08:53):
has putting spells on him? Because he would come back
and she would say his eyes look different, because my
dad used to have these green hazel eyes. The last
time that he came to visit was in twenty twenty three.
I want to say, like for Christmas. My mom told
me that like his eyes looked blue this time, that

(09:14):
they weren't like haze or green. She would say, like
isla blue has the ones that are out in Mexico
that are doing things to him. And she, even though
she's super religious, she always believed in like folklore because
she was the type of mom to tell us about
la yourna and ekku to try and get us to
like behave. She would tell me like owls or witches,

(09:38):
and especially like in our neighborhood, like up in Alta Dina,
I would never really hear owls until my dad would
come back from Mexico, which made me start believing what
my mom was saying, that like owls were riches because
if he was coming, we wouldn't hear any owls, and
then suddenly he would have visited and we'd hear three

(09:59):
of them at night. We would go walk my dog
at night and we would hear them and she would
say that they're following us and me trying to light
light in the mood and make a joke out of it,
because at first I didn't want to believe that they were.
I would say, oh, somethusmares like they're here to follow you.
They're like, they're trying to talk to you. She would

(10:19):
just give me that typical Mexican mom look like she's pissed.
I would just laugh it off and we'd go back.
I got back from work and I had got gotten
into the shower. I remember feeling rushed because I knew
that he was going to leave soon. For some reason,

(10:41):
I started to think, like, in the middle of the shower,
I have to hurry, I have to get out there,
and I had to hug my dad goodbye soon. Right
when I had that thought, like, he came out to
the door, knocked on it, and he said, okay by me.
Johanos memo was like I have to leave already, like
I had to cut and catch the light back to Mexico.
I always regretted the fact that I never got out

(11:01):
soon enough to hug him goodbye, because that was the
last time I ever saw him in person. She ended
up passing in March of twenty twenty three. I got
the news after getting off of work. I came back
and I noticed that my sister's truck, my niece and
her husband had also came. That everyone was in the driveway.

(11:26):
So I came and I parked my car, and my
mom had came out to greet me, which usually she
didn't do, and I was like, Okay, something must have happened,
someone must have got her, or there's something serious going on,
because she usually they don't visit this much. I saw
that it was my sister, my nieces, and her husband

(11:49):
and they were all like in a serious mood. So
I was like, Okay, what's happening. This is like at
the point where my sister had broken down again, because
I saw that her eyes were already like red and puffy,
and she just broke down. She told me like my
dad had passed away. He had been out with friends
and he had been drinking. That they got into an
argument and instead of like him trying to stay in

(12:11):
like fire or anything, he just ended up like driving home.
But since he had been drinking, and especially in Mexico,
he didn't like wearing a seatbelt. On the way back
to the ranch, they filmed his truck that had flipped
over and he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, so he ended
up passing. He hit his head on a rock. After that,

(12:35):
the following day, we got the soonest flight back to Mexico,
and my mom said that she didn't want to go,
that she had no reason to go because they weren't
on the best of terms. So she stayed back, even
though she was upset that because it was the man
that she married after all. She was upsetious, but she
stayed behind me and my sister and my brothers. We

(12:57):
all went to Mexico after we had the ros audio
at the ranch that my dad had after everything was done,
it was just me, my sister, my brother, and her
cousins who had drove us there. Well, they were talking
outside because I had already come to visit this ranch

(13:19):
and I had lived with my dad here for six
months before I had gotten really sick and I had
to go back to the US. I was sitting in
his room just talking out loud, talking like if he
was still there, telling him how I missed him and
that I wish she wouldn't have been drinking, and that
he would have used the seatbelt. My sister calls me

(13:41):
from outside, telling me like it's time to go, that
we had to leave already. I get up and I
tell I say out loud, I love you, bomb like
I miss you. I have to go now. I get
up and I go to turn off the light, and
right when my hand reaches the switch, like the lights
starts to flicker on and off, and I pulled my
hand away, thinking oh, maybe it was like me like

(14:04):
accidentally hitting the switch, or I had some static charge
or something like. Trying to reason it away, I took
a step back and I said out like bye, is
that you? And the lights flickered on and off again.
I was just standing there like dumbfounded, and I quickly
like I called my sister my brother to come in here.
I was like, come in here, thay, my dad's still

(14:24):
here trying to talk to us. They come in and
I go, but tell them you're here, to show them
that you're still here with me. The lights just completely
shut off without anyone being next to the light switch.
And at this point, like we're all crying and we're

(14:48):
like it's just really emotional. My sister hugs me, and
she ends up telling me like, Okay, we have to
go now. We're gonna miss her flight if we don't.
So everyone leaves and I stay back a little bit longer,
and it like, right before going out the door, I
tell him like I love you, like I'm miss you.

(15:12):
We go back to the US, and I was still
really depressed. I started drinking a lot. I stopped going
to work for a week straight, and I was just
really depressed, and I was at this time, I was suicidal,
and I was thinking about just like ending it all.
I remember when night I just ended up drinking so
much I passed out in bed. And I remember this

(15:35):
dream so vividly. The best way that I could explain
it was maybe like an airport or like a subway
where there's like a bunch of people that are doing
like their daily commutes, like just people passing back and forth.
In the background. I'm walking through like this airport slash subway,
and I see my dad and he's like facing me,

(15:58):
and he's holding out his arms as it's like to say,
it's gonna give me a hug, and I run up
next to him and I hug him tight, and standing
next to him, there's this man but I can't see
his face. It's just a bright, like really bright light
covering his face. Just I thought it was weird and
I didn't pay much attention to it, but it was

(16:19):
just like this really bright white light covering this guy's
face standing next to my dad like with a hand
on his shoulder. I look at my dad and I
tell him like, I don't know what to do, but
I miss you and like I should have said goodbye.

(16:41):
I should have spend more time with you. And he's
telling me like, don't be sad like these things happen.
He's telling me like, you can't stay like this forever.
You gotta go on. And he tells, you can't stay

(17:03):
like this. It breaks my heart to see you like this,
and I tell him I don't know what to do.
I feel lost. I wish I would have been there
to like actually hug him one last time before he
had to go. And that's when he hugs me and

(17:30):
he says, I wish I could have said goodbye to
you too, And then he tells me like, yeah, I
didn'tkaid me. I have to go now, and I start
crying I'm telling him, like, no, don't leave me. I

(17:51):
don't know what to do without you. And he hugs me,
and he says, you have to be strong. You're the
man of the house. Now you gotta take care of
your mom and your brother. I had to go now

(18:13):
me home, and he gives me a strong hug. And
that's when the man that's sunning right next to him,
what the bright light covering his face, reaches out. He
puts a hand on his shoulder and I wake up
sitting in bed, just crying the uper tears falling down
my face, and I feel like someone's hugging me really tight,

(18:38):
just emotions overflowing. I'm sitting there crying. I still feel
like someone's holding me tightly, giving me a really strong hug,
and I say, oh, I should have hugged him one
last time before he left. And that's when I feel
like the person stop hugging me, and I just end

(18:59):
up passing out again. Even though my mom didn't go
to the burial, she said that she had her own experience.
When we were over there in Mexico. She was crying
and she told me the story. After I told her
about the dream, she said that she was crying in

(19:21):
the backyard and then this flock of mourning doves comes
and lands on like the trees next to her, and
they start singing, and she looks up at them and
like she says, that is do yeh? Is that you?
And after they started singing, like, I started seeing them
more at work, and I would always say whenever I

(19:43):
saw them, like on a lamp post or just like
hanging out on the power lights, I would always look
up in that and said, hey, Pod, like thinking like
that's you watching over me. I would always just and
I still do it now whenever I see like a
mourning dove hanging around on the power line or anything,
I just look up at them and I said, hey, Bob,

(20:04):
knowing that he's still watching out for us. After life
had gotten back to normal for us and we had
gotten out most of the grief from my dad's passing,

(20:25):
life started to go back to normal. I started going
back to work again. I started going out with this
one girl. I don't really know how to explain it.
Like she wasn't into not fully satanic stuff, but she
was into like the idea of like astrology and all
this other stuff. I always thought it was like very
witchy like paganism and stuff like that, and we would

(20:48):
hang out a line and we were starting to get
into a serious relationship. But I remember one night, getting
back home and going to sleep, I had this dream
again where I thought it was my dad, but the
dream started off where it was these two fish in
a pond. I want to say it was like a
mix of two dreams that I would just swap scenes

(21:10):
back and forth. First there would be a scene with
my dad just talking to him and like just remming
and seeing about old times, and then it would swap
to the scene of these fish just swimming around each other.
I remember in the dream just feeling something was weird,
Like at this point it had become lucid, and I
was able to realize, oh, I'm dreaming, and I looked

(21:32):
down on my hands, and I was like, this is weird.
And I started noticing something else was weird about this fish.
And then I realized, I'm not talking to my dad.
Something feels weird about this, like it doesn't really seem
like my dad. And that's when like this like the
image of my dad just like melts away into it's

(21:53):
black goo and it slides into a pond and then
the fish just gets absorbed into this ball of Google.
It comes out of the pond as like this tall,
like shadowy figure with just glowing red eyes. This really
I don't know how else to describe it, but this
disgusting looking smile on it, like just super wide, like

(22:18):
covering its whole face. That's when I start feeling really weird.
And that's when I hear like this deep guttural voice
say to me, like we're gonna play. And that's when
I wake up and I have sleep paralysis for the
first time in my life. I can't move my body.
I'm breaking out at this point. I'm like, I'm getting

(22:42):
chills right now talking about it. I can't move my
whole body. I'm trying to look around, move my head,
and when I look over to my right as far
right as I can, I see the tall, shadowy figure
for my dream just standing there next to me, like smiling,
and I start to hear it laughing. Even though I
hadn't been religious up until this point, Like during my childhood,

(23:05):
I was like religious. We would go to church every Sunday,
we would pray before going to bed. But after my
dad passed, I had stopped doing all that because I
felt like God took him away. But when this happened,
I started praying. I started saying Jesus helped me, and
it would just laugh at me. Every time I try
to say Jesus. I just kept praying and trying to

(23:27):
say someone helped me, like someone saved me. The laughing
got louder and louder, until I was trying to my
heart is just to say Jesus help me out loud,
but all that would come out of my mouth was
just like And when I finally got the word Jesus
out like, it stopped laughing, and it looked at me

(23:47):
like serious, Like the smile on its face just got
smaller and smaller. And when I finally was able to
say Jesus helped me, it just went away. I was
able to break out of my sleep paralysis and I
sat up and I was like dripped in sweat. That
was the first time ever that I had gone in
sleep prolysis, and I had, for some reason, tied it

(24:11):
to this girl. So the next time that I saw her,
I told her like, hey, I don't think this is
going to work out. I don't know why, but I
feel like there's something attached to you that tried to
mess with me, so we have to break things off.
I stopped talking to her completely, and I told her like,

(24:32):
do you need to go to church. I think something's
attached to you. There's something able, and you just need
to get help. If it was like attached to me,
I don't want to come after you. And if it
was attached to you, I think you need help getting
rid of it. The second time ever that I had
sleep prolysis was after the fact of the wildfires that

(24:52):
happened in California. Our house was completely destroyed in the
eating fires. For the first week we stayed with my
own go on and then after that we got like
an airbnb and then this airbnb. The way it was
laid out was it was in the back lot of
another house. In the back right corner was the small

(25:14):
bedroom and that was the bedroom that I got because
I got to pick last of the bedrooms. It was
always colder than the rest of the house. In the mornings,
it would be walking into a walk in freezer. I
want to say a week into staying there after the fires,
that's when I had my first sleep proalysis and I
had it twice in one night, which had never happened before.

(25:36):
This was my second time experiencing it. The first time,
I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything, but my
knee was hanging off of the bed because I was
sleeping on my side. And usually when I hear about
these stories, I hear like they're sleeping on their back,
they feel some pressure on them. But the first time
that I felt it that night, I was like, thank God,

(25:57):
nothing's happening this time. It happened last time, but I
was still really scared, and I stayed up because I
saw it was like two in the morning, and I
was like, Okay, I don't want to fall asleep when
it's three in the morning because everyone always says it's
like the witching hour, and just in case like I
got sleep proalyssies again, I was like, just to be
extra sure, like I don't see anything, I don't feel anything,

(26:19):
I'm not going to fall asleep until like past three.
But my body was tired, and eventually I ended up
passing out before it was four o'clock, before the witching
hour had passed. That was probably my biggest mistake. I
almost immediately after passing out, I wake up again, and
I start feeling that feeling like electricity going through my body.

(26:45):
And I've learned that now that's what the signal is for,
like sleep prolyssis, at least for me. This time, I
was completely on my back and I start feeling like
the bed start to lower slowly. I'm laying completely flat,
so I can barely look down enough to where I

(27:05):
can see where the mattress is slowly sinking, and I
feel something start to get on top of my lap
and then like start to lean forward on my chest.
And when this started happening, I remembered, like what happened
the first time that I ever had sleep paralysis. Like
I started praying. I started saying Jesus helped me. The

(27:27):
same time as the first. I couldn't get the words out.
I felt like someone was just trying to push all
the air out of my body and I was gasping
for air. I was trying to move my whole body around,
like struggling to get up. And then when I finally
got the word Jesus out, that's when I start hearing
like this disgusting ex hello bro. And then I feel

(27:50):
all the pressure off of my body just leave I
just got the biggest chills down my bag, saying that
the whole experience for me was like the next day,
I didn't want to go to sleep at all. I
wanted things. Some part of me made it all up.
So I went and I pushed like every inch of

(28:11):
the mattress down. I messed with the pillows. I tried
to recreate the sound, and I couldn't get anything close
to that sound. I wanted to find a reason to
help me think that I was just making things up,
that it was a noise or something, but I couldn't
replicate that noise at all. The next night, I didn't

(28:31):
go to sleep at all. I stayed up the twenty
four hours. I started to get sleepy. I just went
to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face. And
after that night, I started praying the Rosary every night,
and I still do before going to sleep, just to
make sure that never happens to me again, thankfully in
this new house that was staying at until our house

(28:52):
was rebuilt. Like, I don't feel anything off. I can
sleep with the lights off, I can sleep with the
completely pitch black. I have nothing wrong with it, as
long as I pray the rosary. But there's nights where
like I'll wake up at one or two in the
morning and I'll be like, oh, I didn't pray the rosary,
like I forgot, and I will start doing it immediately
to make sure like nothing happens. After the first couple

(29:13):
of days, I was like, Okay, I lost everything because
we got evacuated. I want to say it was and
it's just like a strange coincidence, But it was like
the Witching Hour because we got woken up earlier that
night by all of the amber alerts, but we didn't
smell smoke, we didn't see the fires or nothing, and
we had got in alerts before saying oh there's during

(29:37):
an evacuation zone, and nothing ever happened. So we thought
it was the same thing because that night we had
gone to walk my dog and we saw like the
smoke off in the distance and we thought, oh, it's
going to be put out before it even gets anywhere
close to us. But we got woken up at three
in the morning, only had like very little time to
get like a change of clothes. We didn't even get
like any of the important documents out, so everything else

(29:59):
went up in flame. James Luckily we got help with
their cars with my dog, just like the change of clothes,
but everything else is lost and we still have to
We dealt with the insurance already. They didn't give us
enough to rebuild the whole house, and we're going to
have to get along. My niece started to go fund
me for us, but it didn't end up making that much.

(30:23):
I've been working more, trying to get a second job,
their job, and then trying to figure out how we're
going to rebuild.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Thank you Adrikae for sharing your experiences with us, and
if you want to help his families, gofund me for
the rebuilding of his home lost in the fires. I
asked Adrika for the link and placed it in the
description of this episode. As always, if you have a
story to share, please visit me over at true Scary
Story dot com and fill out the form to support

(31:02):
this At our other shows from Scary FM, try out
Scary Plus over at scaryplus dot com to get them
ad free. My username is Edwin cove E d w
I n c O v over on TikTok, Instagram, and
Facebook in case you want to share more creepy stuff
that way. Anyway, Thank you very much for listening. Keep

(31:23):
it scary everyone see as soon