Transcript
Narrator (0:00)
Hey, welcome to Scary Stories and Rain. Before we begin, be sure to check out my brand new podcast, Scary Stories and Fire. If you would prefer the same great stories but with a super relaxing campfire background, the link is in the description. Also, if you haven't yet, I highly recommend you subscribe to this podcast. If you enjoy listening to Relax or Fall Asleep hundreds of hours of stories and rain for $2.99 a month. That will get you access to all episodes with zero ads. Consider subscribing and I hope you enjoy this episode. For context and posterity, the current date is October 7, 2021. I am bringing you back to the year 1999. Over 20 years in the past, back when cellular phones meant nothing, the world thought an imminent Armageddon was coming on the night of December 31st at midnight, I was 16 years old. What I saw one cold October night is as fresh to me then as it is now. Bear with me as I set the stage for you. I grew up in a remote area of the Midwest. My home was on a hill all by its lonesome, surrounded by farmland on three sides and endless acres of woods. After the fields of wheat, corn or whatever we planted that season, the woods were dense and foreboding. We would not be out there after dark. A lonely two lane road was the only way in or out of our place. Old County Road 577 it was called. An amazing thing happened right around my 16th birthday. The Internet. We had a computer already, maybe for a few years or so. This was huge in my little area of the world. We didn't have much money, but I think my parents could foresee how important a PC would be for me and my brothers. They barely used it, but man, we were off to the races. I guess it must have been a Dell or a Gateway, which were huge back then. Windows 95 was the operating system for anyone born in my generation. Just remember when that Windows Brick Maze screensaver came on. The nostalgia is strong with that one. To the newer folks in the Gen Z crowd, just having a computer was a thrill. The Internet wasn't a thought quite quite yet. Not to us normal people at least. We had quite enough fun just playing PC games, typing silly stories and using Ms. Paint. If you had a printer, you could also make those giant banners with the clip art and funny fonts. I remember making a banner that said Broncos because I was rooting for them to win one of the Super Bowls around that time. Every letter took up one page. Those seven letters drained our printer of ink different times for Sure. I might be getting off topic. Sorry, I was just drowning in late 90s feels. I guess the point I am getting at is that being in that era of owning the tuned up PCs was awesome. These weren't your 1980s computers that ran one program. They were easy to learn and could do many things. The Internet however changed everything. Yes, understatement of the century. I know. Another interesting thing is that we grew up without the finely tuned and polished search engines that we use today. You didn't google anything you couldn't type in sports in Yahoo or whatever. Yes, the search engines were very soon to come. The ones you could use were very shoddy and hard to find anything not like the complete ease we enjoy today. My dad changed our entire living room around the computer. He built a computer desk with plenty of shelves and perfectly sized cutouts for the computer monitor, sliding drawer for the keyboard, etc. He also installed a sliding glass door close to where the computer was. So while playing one of the earliest point and click PC games, we could enjoy the vast outdoor landscape and have an easy exit from the home to take a leak. Hey. Our nearest neighbor was over two miles away and there were four of us boys in the home. The first time we tried getting online was painful. The only Internet provider in that time was just as new at this than anyone else. We sat and listened to that now iconic dial up dubstep tone hoping for magic. We got nothing. We tried for weeks to get connected. We didn't know what we were missing. It's not like now if your Internet goes down, you know, but once we got on, man, it was on. The rest is history. Here I was staying up late at night surfing the web, finding websites that was accessing me information from around the world and here at home in the US back then you might see a commercial on Saturday morning telling you to join them on the world Wide web and provide their address. Like I said, you pretty much had to have the URL correct to find things. If there was a sports show on, they might tell you to go to the Sports Illustrated site for kids and provide that long URL. Now we all know you could just google sikids or something like that and find it in.0001 seconds. Being connected felt great. Where I lived was vast, unforgiving, and kind of lonely. The worst thing that no one talked about was that it was just plain creepy. There was no streetlights after dark where I lived. The long county roads were empty at night. When a car did travel up that road, I usually stayed still in my room, I hated seeing the reflection of their headlights slowly light up the upstairs window. No one should be on that road that late. Maybe besides truck drivers, but even then we were so out of the way of any major city or freeway, there shouldn't even be commercial drivers out there. I know you're probably confused by what the hell all this rambling is getting to. It is all related. The advent of the Internet to my daily life as a young man brought with it a renewed interest in scary stories, movies and the like. I already loved renting horror movies from town about 20 minutes away. When I could, I rented scary books from the library. My friends and I made up our own urban legends for fun. Now I could access horror, horror movie lore, serial killer stories, and anything my little teenage brain could think of. Being in such a secluded area, this didn't exactly help my anxiety about my scary surroundings. Sitting at that computer with the giant sliding door to my right, I only saw darkness. We didn't have curtains yet at that time. One night at around 1am If I had to guess, I saw something I think about almost every day of my life. I can't explain it, and I am still terrified of it. I was online by myself. Everyone else was asleep. I was probably playing a flash game or looking up sports stats. I heard the low rumble of a vehicle coming in the distance. That always got me on high alert. As I mentioned, I could get a sense of the vehicle coming and just hoped it would pass by the sliding door without any kind of incident. There was an incident. A small red pickup truck, maybe a Ford Ranger, skidded off the road maybe 100 or so yards from our house. I was looking at the rear of the vehicle. I quickly shut the living room light off and the computer monitor. I just knew this wasn't going to be good. I huddled close to the window, trying to hide as much myself as I could. Realistically, I'm sure no one could see me from that far away. But I could see them. Two men busted out of the truck. The driver was a burly man. He wore a plaid long sleeve and a puffy vest over it. Typical looking northern hillbilly. He quickly moved to the passenger side, yanking the door open. He could have ripped the door off the hinges with the force he used. He grabbed a smaller man out of the truck by his collar and tossed him to the ground. At this point, my little heart was racing. The passenger was clearly the inferior man in the duo. The driver threw the tailgate and grabbed a shovel. He tossed it to the Passenger hitting him in the hands as the shovel fell to the ground. The passenger looked terrified. The driver grabbed what looked like a burlap sack out of the back. He tossed it to the passenger forcefully, but this time the smaller guy caught it. Even from this distance, I could see the look on the inferior man's face. His eyes were wide. He was probably crying with snot coming down from his nose. His expression said, please don't do this. He was pleading with exaggerated hand movements. He seemed depleted lead for some time. Please don't make me do this is what he was conveying. The burly man pointed at the ground. I couldn't make out what he was saying, but it seemed like he was saying dig. The passenger reluctantly started digging. After about five to 10 minutes, the burly man stopped his partner and pointed at the burlap sack that now sat on the ground. He then pointed at the ground. The now defeated digger kicked the sack into the fresh hole in the ground. The sack looked like it could hold a bowling ball or a human head. That's all I could think of. I am watching someone bury a human head on our property. The man with the shovel buried the head or sack, filling up the hole with the dirt he'd just excavated. The driver grabbed the man, pushing him back into the truck. He threw the shovel in the back of the pickup and sped off. After what seemed like an eternity, I took a huge breath, realizing I probably had been holding it in for the entire transaction. Gasping for air, I ran up to my room on the second floor of our house. I was dripping with sweat. I didn't even realize how terrified I was. Did they see me? Why did they choose to stop right there by one of the only houses within miles? I hope I was just overreacting, but what the hell else could these random guys be burying at this time of night? I remember it being cold, probably not winter, because the ground would have been frozen. But it was not pleasant out. What drove these guys out here? I didn't want to know. I have only told this story to a few people and they all asked the same question. Did you go to see what it was the next day? The answer is hell no. I didn't have the stones to look. That curiosity has always stayed with me. I couldn't say for sure who those guys were. Nothing like this happened before or after. I won't say the cliche thing of like it haunts me every single day or anything, but I do think of it often. I think the worst part is a few days after this happened. I saw a dirt covered shovel in our barn. A small amount of what looked like dry blood dotted the tip of the shovel. I never mentioned this, but my dad never allowed us to enter the barn. He said it wasn't safe. I shouldn't have seen what happened, and I shouldn't have gone into the barn. I can't question my dad. He died a long time ago. Even worse is that my dad did own a small pickup truck at that time. I never put it together until much later. Maybe it's all a huge coincidence. My dad was a good man. He was a simple farmer. We were able to afford luxuries that most farm folk couldn't, though, like expensive computers and Internet access before anyone else. Just a coincidence, right? The stranger was walking down the quiet rural street, dressed in a suit and tie. It was midnight. I had just gotten home from a night out with my friends when I saw the stranger shuffling past my house. Hey, buddy, you all right? I hollered from the front porch. The stranger ignored me and kept walking. I briefly considered shrugging off the oddity and heading indoors, but I could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. I know most of the people who live along the road. Some are even relatives, so I couldn't in good conscience ignore my gut. I climbed back into my car, thinking it would be a good barrier between the stranger and me if he were to try anything, and took off in pursuit. He hadn't gotten far when I rolled up to him, cracking the passenger window, and asked, are you okay? The stranger was drenched in sweat and staring distantly through fogged glasses. He looked to be in his early 40s, maybe younger. Sir, I said, did your car break down somewhere? Without looking at me, the man quietly answered, no. Are you staying nearby? There was a momentary pause, followed by another quiet no. I kept my car rolling at the stranger's pace, observing his shaking hands. He appeared anxious. Whether that was because of me or something else, I do not know, but his behavior did nothing but give further cause for concern. Do you need me to call someone?