October 15, 2025 • 19 mins
A true scary story about a quiet ranch house on the outskirts of Hollister, California, where a group of friends thought they were in for a simple sleepover. But as the night grew darker, something unseen began to stir in the hallway, and made sure they knew it was there.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
In a quiet ranch house on the outskirts of Hollister, California.
A group of friends thought that they were in for
a simple sleepover, but as the night grew darker, something
unseen began to stir in the hallway. My name is Edward,
and here is Alex. It's true scary story.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I live in a town called Hollister in California, which
is about an hour south of San Jose and about
forty five minutes to an hour inland from Monterey, so
right in the central coast area. This happened back in
two thousand and eight. I was seventeen years old. My
(00:55):
mom's family has lived here since the town was founded.
She's fifth generation here, so i'd be sixth generation here.
There's a lot of things that have happened in this
town that I have encountered and experienced to myself. I
(01:18):
was good friends with a girl here in town whose
family owns a ranch out in the hills. She invited
me for a sleepover for another friend's birthday party. I
had heard stories about some of the older ranches having
(01:40):
activity paranormal and whatever. I had never experienced at a
friend's house before, so I didn't think anything of it
when she invited all of us out to her house.
She lives fifteen minutes outside of town, so it's not
super fun. But at the time, I didn't have a
(02:02):
car somewhere. Mom had to drive me out and pick
me up. The next day, there was four of us
girls all at this little slumber party. Her dad and
older brother were out of the house for the night.
They had just gotten a new horse. They were testing
out how he was going to do on a camping trip.
(02:26):
They were using him as a pack horse. They were
on the back end of the ranch, so it was
just all of us girls in the house. The dogs
were gone, your dad and her brother were gone. We
had free raid, we had gotten some pizzas. We decided
(02:46):
we're going to sit down and watch some scary movies.
You know, typical teenager girl stuff. Nothing really was going on,
you know. I was on one couch. The other three
girls were on the big couch. We were all hanging
out our sweatpants under blankets, chit chatting, watching some movies,
(03:09):
and I think we were watching Constantine with Keanu Reeves.
The way her living room was set up, her couches
were in kind of like a U shape, so I
was on a little love seat with my back to
her kitchen, and they were on a bigger couch kind
of in the middle of the room. So I'm hanging
(03:32):
out watching this movie and I see a little bit
of movement off to my right, and I don't take
anything of it. We're out in the country, you know.
It could have been a mouse, it could have been
a spider. I don't take anything of it. And then
I notice, I don't know, maybe ten fifteen minutes later,
(03:55):
I'm hearing some noises down her hallway. It's an old
branch house. You know, houses settle, there's little noises that happen,
little creeks, houses are groaning, you know. Holliser itself is
actually well, very well known for earthquakes. We're right on
a fault line out here. It's not unusual that, you know,
(04:18):
we're having little mini earthquakes all day. So I didn't
think of anything of the noises at all, just minded
my business trying to watch this movie. And then it
started getting louder. It almost sounded like like somebody was
shuffling up and down at the end of the hallway,
(04:41):
and I was sicking to myself. Nobody else is here,
it's just us girls. Maybe one of the dogs is
back there. Maybe they didn't take one of the dogs.
Leave it alone, don't pay attention to it. And then
it starts getting louder, like it's getting closer coming down
the hallway. I look and I don't see anything, like
(05:05):
the lights on, you can see all the way to
the end. Don't see anything, no shadow, no nothing. And
I look over to my friends on the other couch
and I lock eyes with the girl whose family owns
the house, and I'm like, what is that? What is
(05:29):
that noise? I can see on her face that she
doesn't really want to talk about it, And I said, look,
I don't care, Like, is somebody else here? Is one
of the dogs back there? She saill, No, that's the
thing that lives in my bedroom. What do you mean,
(05:49):
the thing that lives in your bedroom? So, from what
she told me, her house is on an old, old ranch,
we have a hospital in town called the Hazel Hawkins Hospital.
(06:11):
Hazel Hawkins was a little girl who died of a
severe infection from appendicitis. If the tale is correct, at
the time there was no hospital close enough to get
her to to save her. So her grandfather donated a
(06:35):
bunch of money to the county to build a hospital
after she passed. The hospital has since been named for her. Supposedly,
the ranch my friend's house is on now was originally
part of that ranch, the Hawkins family ranch. I don't
(06:57):
know if that's true. That's what she told me, but regardless,
there was something on the property that wanted to be known.
Whether it be the ghost of this little girl or
the spirit of something else, it wanted us to know.
(07:19):
It was there that night for whatever reason. She's telling me,
I don't know what it is. I don't know who
it is. I think it's this little girl. I don't
see her. I just kind of see an outline of
a person when it whoever decides to make themselves known.
(07:47):
But I can't tell if it's male or female. It's
just like a silhouette. So how often does this happen?
She says, not too often, but it does happen often
enough that I don't tend to like to have a
bunch of people over here just in case something happens.
(08:11):
I was like, has anything bad happened? She's all, no,
nothing bad, but you know, weird stuff happens, Like we'll
go outside in the morning, and there will be broken
plates outside, but they don't match our dishes, or something
that I have been missing for two weeks shows up
on the kitchen table. Things get moved around, We're finding
(08:34):
random stuff outside, we're fighting random stuff inside. Just weird,
random disappearing reappearing act sort of things. And then the noises,
you know, the shuffling and the tapping, And this doesn't
bother you. She's although, no, I've lived with it for
so long, but it's like specifically located in your bedroom.
(09:00):
And she said, well, I mean it's kind of centered there,
but it's kind of also all over the house. She's like,
but I'm also not sure if it's just one entity
or multiple entities. Are any of them malevolent not to
her knowledge. Well, we're going to leave that alone. We're
(09:22):
gonna try to ignore it. We go back to watching
our movie. The noises continue, and it continues like this
(09:43):
for another hour or so until we decide we're going
to change. Like the movie ends, we decide we're going
to watch another movie. The noises that I'm hearing, the
shuffling and the tapping, are coming closer down the hallway
towards the living room where we're sitting and I'm getting uncomfortable.
(10:07):
I have always been on the more sensitive side to things.
I've had multiple things happened to me in my lifetime
where I've experienced little things here and there. But the entity, spirit, ghost,
whatever you would like to call it, was super agitated.
I don't know if it's because we acknowledged it and
(10:29):
then decided we were done acknowledging it, and it was
not done with our attention, and it wanted more attention. Honestly,
I don't know what was said to make it mad
or upset it, whatever the situation may have been. But
the noises that it's making now it's tapping on the walls,
(10:50):
but it's coming down the hallway. You can hear it
getting closer. And if you ever had something really really
large go past you at speed, like a semi truck
and you have that whoosh of air as it comes
past you, I heard it. It was an audible come
(11:16):
around the back of the big couch, not towards me,
around the side of the girls, farther away from me,
towards her backyard area. You hear it like kind of
rushing down the hall like the tapping at this point,
it sounded like footsteps, like running, and then just around
(11:39):
the back of the couch, and then it sounded like
it dropped something incredibly heavy on the floor, just a
huge slam on the floor. All of us just screamed.
(11:59):
I've never seen girls move so quickly. The three girls
on the one couch all jumped from the bigger couch
onto my smaller, little love seat. I don't know if
they thought I was going to protect them or they
just wanted to get away from whatever it was, but
it was so loud. It sounded like somebody took like
(12:21):
a really big, heavy bag of something and just slammed
it into the ground. It was deafening. The whole living
room shook like I still get anxious talking about it.
Just it was. It was so shocking. I've never had
(12:43):
something react so aggressively towards me. I mean, I've experienced
a lot of odd things in my lifetime, but that was.
It escalated so quickly. The aggression from just like little
noises down the hallway to it like ring down the
hallway and slamming itself into the ground, or just making
(13:04):
this huge slamming noise. Was so quick and so aggressive.
It scared me. I looked over the couch the other
couch after the fact, after we'd all calmed down, and
there was there was nothing over there. Nothing had fallen,
nothing had been knocked over. I don't know if it
(13:26):
just could physically manifest for a couple seconds and just
use whatever force it had to throw some weight around,
or what the situation was, but there was nothing on
the floor on that end of the couch. The other
girls were terrified. I looked at the other girls and
I said, I'm sorry if you think we're ignoring you,
(13:51):
We're not ignoring you. We don't want to bother you.
I didn't know what else to do at that point.
I felt like I needed to apologize to the spirit
for not acknowledging it earlier, or saying hello, or whatever
it wanted from us. We did talk about it a
(14:14):
little bit. It was more like a what was that?
What's going on? Do we need to go? Like? What
do we do? I don't even think she knew what
to do, Like she'd been living with it for so long.
I don't think it had ever done anything like that
to her before. We all just kind of sat there
shaking for probably a good half an hour until we
(14:37):
decided that it wasn't going to do anything else. You know,
we were teenagers. We didn't know what to do at
that point. We were just kind of panicking because we
were alone and none of us had any way to
go anywhere, so it was like, well, what do we do?
We can't leave. We all ended up sleeping in her
(15:02):
older brother's bedroom because he had the biggest bed and
all four of us could sleep in one bed together.
I didn't really sleep that night. I kept waking up
just assuming I was going to see something in front
of me, and for the rest of my time there,
I did not want to be in that house. The
(15:25):
next morning, when her brother and her dad got back,
we went outside to talk to them and whatever. The
other girls wanted another a piece of leftover pizza, so
I went back inside to grab some snacks, and I
had angled myself so I could keep an eye down
the hallway because I didn't want to be scared again.
(15:48):
I didn't want to be shocked again. But I never
slept at that house again. I have been out there since.
I would not go go out there at night unless
I knew I had a way to get home, because
there was no way I was sleeping out there. Again,
whatever it is that resides on that property, I don't
(16:14):
think it's malevolent, but it definitely does not like to
be ignored. And it made itself very clear that night
that if we were going to speak about it, we
needed to acknowledge the fact that it was actually there
and not just talk about it in general. Unfortunately, I
(16:39):
don't really talk to her anymore, so I don't know
if she's still experiencing things. I'm not sure where where
she's living now, but that was probably one of my
more terrifying experiences. And I mean I've experienced some other things,
(17:02):
but that was my first real experience, like it actually
happening to me, not just me having a feeling in
a building or a random location. I don't take I'll
ever forget it to this day, vividly. I remember sitting
(17:24):
on that couch and hearing that wushing and that slam
on the ground, and being absolutely terrified that it was
going to do something to us. I've always been more
in touch with my spiritual side, Like I'm not religious
by any means. I did go to Catholic school, but
I never stayed with an organized religion. I've always been
(17:46):
more in touch with my spiritual side, and I've always
believed that there must be some sort of afterlife, you know,
there must be some sort of other side that Never
in a thousand years I have thought something like that
would happen to me. I always thought that was just
something you've heard in like stories or saw in a movie.
(18:11):
It was just so bizarre, and I still see the
whole scene so vividly in my mind, like that is
something that will never leave me.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Make sure you're following this podcast to get next week's story.
You can get weekly Paranormal Mysteries through our newsletter. The
link is in the description of this episode. This story
was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel a
VW sound Additional production by me Edwin Cowarrubiez and the
Scary FM team. Thank you very much for listening. It's
(18:49):
scary everyone. Let's see you soon.
In a quiet ranch house on the outskirts of Hollister, California.
A group of friends thought that they were in for
a simple sleepover, but as the night grew darker, something
unseen began to stir in the hallway. My name is Edward,
and here is Alex. It's true scary story.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
I live in a town called Hollister in California, which
is about an hour south of San Jose and about
forty five minutes to an hour inland from Monterey, so
right in the central coast area. This happened back in
two thousand and eight. I was seventeen years old. My
(00:55):
mom's family has lived here since the town was founded.
She's fifth generation here, so i'd be sixth generation here.
There's a lot of things that have happened in this
town that I have encountered and experienced to myself. I
(01:18):
was good friends with a girl here in town whose
family owns a ranch out in the hills. She invited
me for a sleepover for another friend's birthday party. I
had heard stories about some of the older ranches having
(01:40):
activity paranormal and whatever. I had never experienced at a
friend's house before, so I didn't think anything of it
when she invited all of us out to her house.
She lives fifteen minutes outside of town, so it's not
super fun. But at the time, I didn't have a
(02:02):
car somewhere. Mom had to drive me out and pick
me up. The next day, there was four of us
girls all at this little slumber party. Her dad and
older brother were out of the house for the night.
They had just gotten a new horse. They were testing
out how he was going to do on a camping trip.
(02:26):
They were using him as a pack horse. They were
on the back end of the ranch, so it was
just all of us girls in the house. The dogs
were gone, your dad and her brother were gone. We
had free raid, we had gotten some pizzas. We decided
(02:46):
we're going to sit down and watch some scary movies.
You know, typical teenager girl stuff. Nothing really was going on,
you know. I was on one couch. The other three
girls were on the big couch. We were all hanging
out our sweatpants under blankets, chit chatting, watching some movies,
(03:09):
and I think we were watching Constantine with Keanu Reeves.
The way her living room was set up, her couches
were in kind of like a U shape, so I
was on a little love seat with my back to
her kitchen, and they were on a bigger couch kind
of in the middle of the room. So I'm hanging
(03:32):
out watching this movie and I see a little bit
of movement off to my right, and I don't take
anything of it. We're out in the country, you know.
It could have been a mouse, it could have been
a spider. I don't take anything of it. And then
I notice, I don't know, maybe ten fifteen minutes later,
(03:55):
I'm hearing some noises down her hallway. It's an old
branch house. You know, houses settle, there's little noises that happen,
little creeks, houses are groaning, you know. Holliser itself is
actually well, very well known for earthquakes. We're right on
a fault line out here. It's not unusual that, you know,
(04:18):
we're having little mini earthquakes all day. So I didn't
think of anything of the noises at all, just minded
my business trying to watch this movie. And then it
started getting louder. It almost sounded like like somebody was
shuffling up and down at the end of the hallway,
(04:41):
and I was sicking to myself. Nobody else is here,
it's just us girls. Maybe one of the dogs is
back there. Maybe they didn't take one of the dogs.
Leave it alone, don't pay attention to it. And then
it starts getting louder, like it's getting closer coming down
the hallway. I look and I don't see anything, like
(05:05):
the lights on, you can see all the way to
the end. Don't see anything, no shadow, no nothing. And
I look over to my friends on the other couch
and I lock eyes with the girl whose family owns
the house, and I'm like, what is that? What is
(05:29):
that noise? I can see on her face that she
doesn't really want to talk about it, And I said, look,
I don't care, Like, is somebody else here? Is one
of the dogs back there? She saill, No, that's the
thing that lives in my bedroom. What do you mean,
(05:49):
the thing that lives in your bedroom? So, from what
she told me, her house is on an old, old ranch,
we have a hospital in town called the Hazel Hawkins Hospital.
(06:11):
Hazel Hawkins was a little girl who died of a
severe infection from appendicitis. If the tale is correct, at
the time there was no hospital close enough to get
her to to save her. So her grandfather donated a
(06:35):
bunch of money to the county to build a hospital
after she passed. The hospital has since been named for her. Supposedly,
the ranch my friend's house is on now was originally
part of that ranch, the Hawkins family ranch. I don't
(06:57):
know if that's true. That's what she told me, but regardless,
there was something on the property that wanted to be known.
Whether it be the ghost of this little girl or
the spirit of something else, it wanted us to know.
(07:19):
It was there that night for whatever reason. She's telling me,
I don't know what it is. I don't know who
it is. I think it's this little girl. I don't
see her. I just kind of see an outline of
a person when it whoever decides to make themselves known.
(07:47):
But I can't tell if it's male or female. It's
just like a silhouette. So how often does this happen?
She says, not too often, but it does happen often
enough that I don't tend to like to have a
bunch of people over here just in case something happens.
(08:11):
I was like, has anything bad happened? She's all, no,
nothing bad, but you know, weird stuff happens, Like we'll
go outside in the morning, and there will be broken
plates outside, but they don't match our dishes, or something
that I have been missing for two weeks shows up
on the kitchen table. Things get moved around, We're finding
(08:34):
random stuff outside, we're fighting random stuff inside. Just weird,
random disappearing reappearing act sort of things. And then the noises,
you know, the shuffling and the tapping, And this doesn't
bother you. She's although, no, I've lived with it for
so long, but it's like specifically located in your bedroom.
(09:00):
And she said, well, I mean it's kind of centered there,
but it's kind of also all over the house. She's like,
but I'm also not sure if it's just one entity
or multiple entities. Are any of them malevolent not to
her knowledge. Well, we're going to leave that alone. We're
(09:22):
gonna try to ignore it. We go back to watching
our movie. The noises continue, and it continues like this
(09:43):
for another hour or so until we decide we're going
to change. Like the movie ends, we decide we're going
to watch another movie. The noises that I'm hearing, the
shuffling and the tapping, are coming closer down the hallway
towards the living room where we're sitting and I'm getting uncomfortable.
(10:07):
I have always been on the more sensitive side to things.
I've had multiple things happened to me in my lifetime
where I've experienced little things here and there. But the entity, spirit, ghost,
whatever you would like to call it, was super agitated.
I don't know if it's because we acknowledged it and
(10:29):
then decided we were done acknowledging it, and it was
not done with our attention, and it wanted more attention. Honestly,
I don't know what was said to make it mad
or upset it, whatever the situation may have been. But
the noises that it's making now it's tapping on the walls,
(10:50):
but it's coming down the hallway. You can hear it
getting closer. And if you ever had something really really
large go past you at speed, like a semi truck
and you have that whoosh of air as it comes
past you, I heard it. It was an audible come
(11:16):
around the back of the big couch, not towards me,
around the side of the girls, farther away from me,
towards her backyard area. You hear it like kind of
rushing down the hall like the tapping at this point,
it sounded like footsteps, like running, and then just around
(11:39):
the back of the couch, and then it sounded like
it dropped something incredibly heavy on the floor, just a
huge slam on the floor. All of us just screamed.
(11:59):
I've never seen girls move so quickly. The three girls
on the one couch all jumped from the bigger couch
onto my smaller, little love seat. I don't know if
they thought I was going to protect them or they
just wanted to get away from whatever it was, but
it was so loud. It sounded like somebody took like
(12:21):
a really big, heavy bag of something and just slammed
it into the ground. It was deafening. The whole living
room shook like I still get anxious talking about it.
Just it was. It was so shocking. I've never had
(12:43):
something react so aggressively towards me. I mean, I've experienced
a lot of odd things in my lifetime, but that was.
It escalated so quickly. The aggression from just like little
noises down the hallway to it like ring down the
hallway and slamming itself into the ground, or just making
(13:04):
this huge slamming noise. Was so quick and so aggressive.
It scared me. I looked over the couch the other
couch after the fact, after we'd all calmed down, and
there was there was nothing over there. Nothing had fallen,
nothing had been knocked over. I don't know if it
(13:26):
just could physically manifest for a couple seconds and just
use whatever force it had to throw some weight around,
or what the situation was, but there was nothing on
the floor on that end of the couch. The other
girls were terrified. I looked at the other girls and
I said, I'm sorry if you think we're ignoring you,
(13:51):
We're not ignoring you. We don't want to bother you.
I didn't know what else to do at that point.
I felt like I needed to apologize to the spirit
for not acknowledging it earlier, or saying hello, or whatever
it wanted from us. We did talk about it a
(14:14):
little bit. It was more like a what was that?
What's going on? Do we need to go? Like? What
do we do? I don't even think she knew what
to do, Like she'd been living with it for so long.
I don't think it had ever done anything like that
to her before. We all just kind of sat there
shaking for probably a good half an hour until we
(14:37):
decided that it wasn't going to do anything else. You know,
we were teenagers. We didn't know what to do at
that point. We were just kind of panicking because we
were alone and none of us had any way to
go anywhere, so it was like, well, what do we do?
We can't leave. We all ended up sleeping in her
(15:02):
older brother's bedroom because he had the biggest bed and
all four of us could sleep in one bed together.
I didn't really sleep that night. I kept waking up
just assuming I was going to see something in front
of me, and for the rest of my time there,
I did not want to be in that house. The
(15:25):
next morning, when her brother and her dad got back,
we went outside to talk to them and whatever. The
other girls wanted another a piece of leftover pizza, so
I went back inside to grab some snacks, and I
had angled myself so I could keep an eye down
the hallway because I didn't want to be scared again.
(15:48):
I didn't want to be shocked again. But I never
slept at that house again. I have been out there since.
I would not go go out there at night unless
I knew I had a way to get home, because
there was no way I was sleeping out there. Again,
whatever it is that resides on that property, I don't
(16:14):
think it's malevolent, but it definitely does not like to
be ignored. And it made itself very clear that night
that if we were going to speak about it, we
needed to acknowledge the fact that it was actually there
and not just talk about it in general. Unfortunately, I
(16:39):
don't really talk to her anymore, so I don't know
if she's still experiencing things. I'm not sure where where
she's living now, but that was probably one of my
more terrifying experiences. And I mean I've experienced some other things,
(17:02):
but that was my first real experience, like it actually
happening to me, not just me having a feeling in
a building or a random location. I don't take I'll
ever forget it to this day, vividly. I remember sitting
(17:24):
on that couch and hearing that wushing and that slam
on the ground, and being absolutely terrified that it was
going to do something to us. I've always been more
in touch with my spiritual side, Like I'm not religious
by any means. I did go to Catholic school, but
I never stayed with an organized religion. I've always been
(17:46):
more in touch with my spiritual side, and I've always
believed that there must be some sort of afterlife, you know,
there must be some sort of other side that Never
in a thousand years I have thought something like that
would happen to me. I always thought that was just
something you've heard in like stories or saw in a movie.
(18:11):
It was just so bizarre, and I still see the
whole scene so vividly in my mind, like that is
something that will never leave me.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Make sure you're following this podcast to get next week's story.
You can get weekly Paranormal Mysteries through our newsletter. The
link is in the description of this episode. This story
was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel a
VW sound Additional production by me Edwin Cowarrubiez and the
Scary FM team. Thank you very much for listening. It's
(18:49):
scary everyone. Let's see you soon.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.