Trouble Sleeping

For a foreign exchange program. Katie went to a world unknown to her.
Once there, she started feeling like she wasn't alone. Could someone close to
her from home be with her or could it be something else, something darker.
My name is Edwin, and here is katie true scary story. My
story takes place in Brazil in twenty eleven, when I was eighteen. I
somehow convinced my parents to let me do a student exchange there. The family
that I stayed with they had a daughter that essentially switched cities with me.
The family has two daughters. One of them was in Texas and then the
other one was there. While I'm there, she introduces me to all of
her friends, and one of her friends was Mariana, who I'm actually still
friends with to this day. But she spoke the most English. I'm going
to Brazil with a high school level of Spanish when it's a country that speaks
only Portuguese. She became my friend. She instantly was just so friendly and
wanted to help me, and so I felt very comfortable talking to her.
So I'm there for a couple months. It's about five months into my exchange
and I'm sleeping in my host sister's bedroom, the one who's in Texas.
After about five months, I'm having trouble sleeping. I cannot sleep like on
a normal schedule. I have to have all of the lights on, I
have to have all of the doors locked. The adjacent bathroom, the light
has to be on, the door has to be locked. It just feels
like somebody's in the room with me. It's like such an uncomfortable feeling,
like I'm just sweaty, and I'm like there's something in here. It's a
very flight or fight response. So my host family they realize, Okay,
you're having trouble sleeping. Obviously you're not getting much sleep. The lights are
on all the time, and you're not going to bed until the sun was
literally up, what's the deal. At the same time, my other host's
sister, her bedroom was across from mine. I noticed one day that like
all of the mirrors in her room were covered. She was never in there.
She was like literally only in there to like change. And then she
always slept in her parents' bedroom on the floor, and I thought that was
odd. It is what it is. People have their peculiarities and whatnot.
And so my post parents were like Oh, why don't you in her bedroom
with her. She's got two beds. I think it would be great,
you guys could both get in good night's sleep. She's not sleeping in our
bedroom anymore. Just try it out. I'm like, at this point,
I haven't been getting sleep. I'm in her room. All the mirrors are
covered, and she's got the TV on and it's just on mute. Around
two am, I just feel this presence again, and I wake up and
it's my host's sister and she's like standing over me, and she's mine mine,
and it just keeps getting louder and louder, and it's mom in Portuguese.
Mine is mom in Portuguese, and it's two am. My American brain
is not comprom hending, like what is going on? And I'm like,
oh my god, this is terrifying. And so her mom runs in the
room and is, oh, it's okay, it's okay, tries to get
her back to sleep, and I'm like, at this point, I'm like,
this is too much. If she's having trouble sleeping in here on this
side of the house and I'm having trouble sleeping, I would just much rather
go back into my room and lock all the doors because I don't need someone
standing over me. At two am in passing, I mentioned this to Madi
because I'm like, I don't understand, like, what's going on. I've
never had this sensation before or this feeling. And she's, hey, so
I'm actually like a medium. Do I go to this place called Centro,
which gabbles in this thing called it mo or spiritism, which was really big
in the eighteen hundreds in the US and it stayed in South America, and
so Brazil still really has a big culture around it. And she's just come
with me, it'll be fine. We can find out, like what's going
on with you? And I'm like, man, I am from the South.
We don't normally play with this type of stuff. This is so out
of my comfort zone. I just don't sure. I guess I was so
desperate to sleep and to have some normality in my life that I was like,
yeah, let's go. So we go, and it is so bizarre
to me. There's Saint effigies all around you, and you're sitting in a
circle and there's Saint effigies all around you and candles lit and there's several different
people at tables with writing utensils and paper, and Madi's at one of them,
and they just tell me that we're going to say the Lord's prayer and
then we're going to start going into this how they described it as almost like
a trance. And I was like, whoa, Okay, this is a
lot, but all right, let's do this. We do all of this,
and I look over at Mahdi and she starts going into this trance.
At that same time, I just start like sobbing, just so emotional,
just can't keep it together. I think, I don't know what it really
was. It was just this overwhelming feeling inside of me. And after everything
ends, everybody shares their stories, all of the meta, tell you what
spirit they contacted, what they wanted, how they helped them, that sort
of thing. And Madi starts to tell who she contacted, and she looks
at me and she goes, do you know somebody named Ballo or Paul.
I'm a little like surprised, and I'm like, that's my grandfather's day.
And she goes, did he have trouble like remembering anything? And I said,
yeah, he passed of Alzheimer's. At this point, I'm just like
there's no way that she could have known this stuff. We'd only been friends
for about five months. My grandfather passed away several years ago. It's not
anything that I would have ever brought up to her, anything that's online or
anything like that. And so I'm just like, oh my god, like,
how do you know this? And she's he's the presence that's in your
bedroom. He's who you're feeling. He's been out for you while you're here.
He just wants to make sure that you're okay. I'm like, what
is going on? This is insane? And started following you when you left
a place with a blue star and I'm like, a blue star, Like
what is she talking about? So fast forward a couple months and my parents
send me a care package and in it is a photo album with like our
house and like restaurants we used to go to, and the beach and all
sorts of stuff. And we're flipping through and she's a wait, go back,
and she points to a picture and she's that's where it started. That's
where he started following you. And it was my house in the US with
a blue star of Texas on her. It was unbelievable, and I've ever
since that moment, I a thousand percent believe I believed it a little bit
before, but this really solidified it for me that there was absolutely no way
she could have known any of this. In no way she could have known
any of this, and it was just just like mind blowing. Honestly,
I don't really know if I have an explanation for what happened. I think
that she probably really does have the ability to communicate with the beyond, and
as much as people harp on that or they don't believe in it, I
can't dispute the fact that she knew things that there's absolutely no way she could
have known. With the idea that it might have been her grandfather watching over
her, Katy was able to feel relieved. But then what was the reason
behind the host's sister avoiding the room. As we'll find out, Katy wasn't
the only one with the strange experience there, and I love that it's coming
up next. I think I didn't know how to process it. When I
told my mom this story, she of course was very like, there's no
way that was your grandfather. Don't play with this stuff. It could have
been something disguised as him and I'm like, you know, I don't know.
I don't know, but I did. But after going with her to
this, it dissipated, like that feeling of being so uncomfortable was no longer
there. I was able to actually sleep, and I was actually able to
accept that, Okay, this could be my grandfather in this room with me.
I was able to accept it, and I was okay after it.
It was very bizarre. I was part of a group of exchange students and
we switched houses. So I stayed with this family for a few months,
and then another exchange student who was also in my group stayed with them as
well. And there was one time towards the end of our exchange that she
asked me. She was like, did you ever feel like weird? Did
you ever have trouble sleeping? And I was like, and I never told
her any of this, And I was like, yes, and she said,
so have I. She said, I've locked the door and somebody has
been trying to get into my room and the door handle keeps shaking and nobody
is doing this. There's no feat like at the bottom of the door,
like where you could see it. Because she has the lights on too,
and she was like there's no feet down there, but there's handle shaking.
So I think there is something in that apartment, and I think that my
other host sister was picking up on it. And it's two it was essentially
two apartments put together, so it could have been just that half of that
apartment. There's just something there because I don't know, it's just she would
not sleep in her room. And I probably should have picked that up from
the very beginning that there is something going on there, but I never really
got to the bottom of that. It was just terrifying. So after going
to Centro for a while, I would go with Maddy and just sit and
watch all of this happen because I started to get more comfortable with it.
And so in the beginning, we would sit there and people would start to
wander in and they'd sit at these chairs and everything, and I would always
look around the circle and just recognize faces, and there would be faces I
didn't recognize. There was always people coming and going. And so there's one
time where Mattie starts to go into this kind of this trance and it's a
very like heated one. She's very emotional, she's crying, she's raising her
voice, and it's not uncommon, but it doesn't happen as often for her.
And I'm watching her and she's the last person to explain what's going on.
She looks dead at me, and she said, so, the girl
I'm talking to doesn't know that she's dead. She's has something wrong with her
heart, but she doesn't know why. She doesn't know why all of these
other people are ignoring her, why her family's ignoring her, And how come
only the American can see her. I was the only American there, and
I'm like, oh my god, this is crazy, Like she must have
been one of those new faces I saw it didn't recognize. And so since
then they had contacted the family, and she gave them enough information to contact
the family and they said, yeah, our daughter passed away very suddenly of
a heart attack. We've been trying to contact her, because that's a very
common thing there is to try to get in touch with your loved ones and
things like that. And they said, we've tried to contact her and she
just died very suddenly of a heart attack. And so essentially the people in
the Santro and Mariana tried to help her pass over and help her find peace.
But I was a little taken aback by the fact that I was the
only one that could see her. And I don't know. I think I
saw a picture of her later when they showed me her obituary, and she
just looked like a girl that I had seen coming and going into the centro,
and I just didn't really think anything of it. It's a wide room,
it's all tile, and then you have just fold chairs essentially in a
circle, and you have these little folding tables set up around the space,
and so in the middle or at the bottom at the base of the circle
is like the Saint effigies and you light a candle before you start. So
it's very open. I guess you could say you could like look up like
Centro di Espiritismo or something like that, and you could type in Brazil.
But I think really just in these like people's houses, like on the bottom
floor in the garage essentially of these people's houses, or in the common space,
and there's all open. There's like the doorways are open to allow people
and spirits to come in and out, and it's just very open. A
lot of people who go are very Catholic. I'm part of the church,
and so if this was happening in the US, people would think, oh,
this is or you're dabbling with witchcraft and what have you. But there
it is very just normal and accepted, and people really go to it for
comfort. They have these centers where they cleanse you of your energy of bad
energy and things like that, which I mean as an American who had no
exposure to this going into it, it was a very mind opening experience and
it was just very neat that this is what people went to for comfort,
and you know, you see that, like people were having real experiences and
getting closure, and I think that's really cool. You'd almost think of it
as trying to think almost a patio is how it was set up like a
covered patio with a few more walls, and it's all tile. All of
it is tile, very calm, there's like usually no talking. I thought
it was interesting because when they would start, the people would whisper and things
like that. But when you started, they would ask you to uncross your
legs. I had my feet crossed and they said you have to uncross them
because it doesn't allow the good energy to come through. I thought thought that
was interesting, and I said, oh, okay, And I've always looked
into these decentros too because I'm curious just to see how it is a cross
continents, if it's the same or if it's a little different. But yeah,
it's a very, very mind opening experience and it definitely made me a
believer. I'll tell you that. Do you have a strange experience you want
to share, visit true scarystory dot com on your browser right now and tell
me about it. You can also find me on Instagram and Facebook by going
to Edwin dot Fm, which you'll link to into the description of this episode.
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channel. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon.