Lady in the Desert

This episode contains non graphic mention of suicide and has real audio recordings of the
neighbors experience in the aftermath. Listener discretion is advised. Today's story involves Michelle,
who has joined up with some of my own podcasts and as an artist
with ongoing projects, she became obsessed with exploring the story of one of her
friends in a house that saw tragedy and strange occurrences that we're experienced firsthand.
My name is Edwin, and he and Michelle true scary story. I'd been
going to Tokoloma Road for about five years and it was like such an awesome
place to visit. I'd stay with my friend Diane, who is a family
friend, the mother of one of my kindergarten friends. So I became better
friends with Diane and then my kindergarten friend. Actually, every summer during college,
I would go and I'd visit Diane on Tokolhoma Road. And it was
such a fun neighborhood because it was in the middle of the desert, so
everybody was inside during the scorching hot summer, and so at night everyone was
outside on the street. Like one of their neighbors they called him Cheese Fang.
I don't really know why, but Cheese Fang would blast Alice Cooper radio
while he worked on his cars. And then Diane and I would drink tequila
under the stars, like in her front yard, just listening to the neighborhood.
It was so fun and magical and weird. It was just like a
neighborhood full of like old hippies and like cactus and it was just great.
Two thousand and eight happened, and that was the housing crash. A few
people in the neighborhood lost their houses, like cheese Fang lost his house and
I had to move. And then another neighbor of there is named Susan killed
herself. And Susan had lived kitty corner from Diane. Susan was this tall
blonde I always liked her, but she always seemed like she had something going
on. As Michelle was working on her art project, she asked for a
description of Susan from Diane. Do you want me to talk about Susan who
was my neighbor. She was tall and blonde and very pretty and outwardly she
was pretty outgoing, but you could tell that there was like a dark side
to her. I always noticed she was just kind of stand offish at times,
and so I just let her be. You hear that big rumble of
that fire truck, and of course you go running into the front windows to
see what's going on at six am, and they stopped. And so I
noticed that Nancy, who lived across the street and was very good friends with
Susan, that she had come running out in her pajamas and was just standing
there, and so I went out and stood next to her, and we
were just watching the scene unfold, and all of a sudden, here comes
to sheriff walking out with this gun on a I don't know what, did
a pin or a pencil or something, and he put it into the car
and we're just standing there, going, oh my god, what happened.
She's still around and her spirit shape, whatever it might be. Obviously,
that was like a herald of change in the neighborhood. The vibe just started
to change, the people started to change in the neighborhood. It started to
get really dodgy. Diane wouldn't hang out in her front yard anymore because there
was like a guy who would walk up and down the street that just freaked
her out and she just would because she was like living alone. And then
another person moved into Susan's old house because her husband left and it was empty,
and this guy named James moved into Susan's old house and James killed himself.
Nancy is Diane's direct neighbor, so if you had to look at it,
Diane's house, Nancy Susan across the street. So Nancy and Diana are
friends. Diane and Susan weren't friends, but not friends, but Nancy and
Susan were really good friends, and she'd known James a little bit. James
had said that he would wake up when there would be a woman pulling at
his feet at night. He had to move his bedroom and one time Nancy
was like saw him gardening and he was like, oh, I have to
leave these for the spirits in the house. They said, he's another weirdo
that's just moved into the neighborhood. This is okay whatever, but yeah,
he'd had an accidental overdose two weeks before, and then he had an full
overdose when he killed himself, and they just thought it was suicide. They
just went with suicide on it. Another family moved into that house and they'd
hear screaming, they'd hear somebody saying hello in the garage, they'd have things
being banged around in the kitchen. So they called the San Bernardino Paranormal Society.
I actually tried to track them down and I could not find them.
At the time, I really did as my investigative mind was like I need
more. I went and I interviewed Nancy for my project, and Diane came
with me, and you can hear like Diane's little commentaries on the tape and
stuff like that, which is nice. Nancy tells his whole story about how
when the paranormal investigators went over there, nothing was happening. And this is
the third family that's moved in, right, so it's been Susan James's new
family. New families having all these problems they're renting, so no one disclosed
to them that there was two deaths in the house like the last two years.
So they get the paranormal investigators over there and nothing's happening, and then
like the granddaughters, wait, wait, Nancy knew both of those people.
Let's go get Nancy. And so Nancy went over there and had a full
fledged conversation with Susan, and was talking with Susan through one of those like
detectors or whatever, like the EMF things. And it's funny because Nancy really
doesn't divulge what Susan said, but she said that Susan kept saying private,
It's private, like it always it just keeps getting weirder. Right, So
my mother got a camera blessed by a Tibetan priest to see ghosts, and
so I had this camera and I was so anything ghost related, right,
I was like, Oh, there's potential for me to use this camera.
And because I was a photographer for so long, I would use this camera
periodically. But I never like took it literally, right. I always thought
of ghosts more as like memories. People are haunted by all sorts of things
that aren't literal specters. But I'm always fascinated when somebody she was having this
literal, literal, supernatural paranormal experience, like it was happening to someone who
is not a huge paranormal person, like someone who's just a lady in the
desert, and it was happening to everyone in the neighborhood. Everyone was having
weird moments of they'd see a figure in that house's window, or like something
strange would happen. So I was just so fascinated by that, and so
I took Nancy's portrait with the ghost camera and recorded the audio. So that
was like the plan and my old work. I'd record audio or do like
a one liner, and I'd write a one liner underneath a photograph. So
I was like, I gonna do a bunch of photographs like that. But
I did take a photo of Nancy wearing Susan's old coat and she had it,
she has it on like this and she's, oh, it still smells
like her, which is I think the quote I used. It was an
interesting time, and I could tell it was ending like that magical time.
So I think maybe the art project was also to explore that Susan and Nancy
were pretty good friends and she misses her. She was saying in the recording
that she'd love to go over there and privately talk to Susan, as opposed
to having the people from the paranormal team there, because clearly Susan didn't want
anything personal talked about in front of anybody. Go back to Diane's and we
have our normal night I mean, we just hang out and there was no
air conditioning in her house, so we just all sweated to death. And
so at night she'd leave, like the birds outside because it was like cool.
She had pet birds. They'd beep outside my room, and I was
sleeping with all the windows open. Woke up in the middle of the night
and I just heard crying, like sobbing, like the deepest sobbing if I
was in your headphones right now, crying like full on, body shaking sobs.
And I thought something had happened to Diane's birds outside, like cause I
just it was that close. And I was like, uh oh, like
an animal in the desert finally killed the birds. It just wouldn't stop.
And so I finally got out of bed, and Diane's bedroom was on the
other side of the house, and I walk over and I knock on her
door, and the crying stops, and no one's crying. Diana's not awake,
no one was crying. The next day, I tell Diana what happened,
and she's like, oh, that's weird, especially because we were like
dealing with Susan's ghost. She goes next door and asks Nancy if like because
Nancy's house was right near my window, and is like, was anybody crying
at your house? And she's no. What strikes me now is that Susan
came. If it was Susan, Susan kept saying private, and then here
I am telling her story and then and I was like there documenting her story,
and she didn't want any of that to happen. Like why I got
a little sobbing visit in the middle of the night, I don't know,
but that's the story. Michelle then records a short interview with Nancy will tell
us about her own experience with a pairent normal investigators and the communication she was
able to establish with Susan's ghosts on the property. I have part of the
actual recording up next. If you hear Nancy's recording, she talks about all
the stuff that James experienced, so you'd have to listen to Nancy's stuff,
but she talked about which I totally forgot, is that when the paranormal investigators
came, they got rid of James because they just asked, if do you
know you're dead? And then all of a sudden, all the stuff that
people were associating with James went away, So did they call the paranormal investigators
or had they heard of it? They looked them up online because when they
first moved in, they were not told that there'd been a suicide there,
so they didn't know. Finally, one time she asked me, she says,
did somebody something of a bad nature something happen here? And he says,
why would you ask? And she said, well, because I hear
women, a woman screening. She has a dog that will not even go
into Susan's bathroom, absolutely won't go. And they say the animals are more
susceptible paranormal than anybody out in children, small children. So then I told
her and she says, well that makes sense, and then she was just
mad. She was just furious because they had lied to her, They had
not told her. She was asking, it's something going on here, something
happened here, and they said, oh, the one gentleman did die that
did die there, but he died of natural causes. That was a role
of suicide as well. So that's when so the paranormal Society what they did
was they went on they found him online and the paranormal Society investigated whether they
wanted to look at this when they found that it was right down from the
cemetery. They considered this to be all Indian land, so there's probably a
lot of Indian burial. And then two suicides, that's what made them interested
in coming out to see if anything had happened. Got here at seven and
they set up everything, and then they had everybody outside of the house except
for the investigators. They were going around doing audio talking and that kind of
thing. But it wasn't until about ten thirty or so when they said,
can I go across the street and get Nancy because Nancy knew them, both
of them, and that's when the machine started going crazy. Okay, we
know Nancy type of thing, so then they got started getting results. Was
once I got over there and there was talking, there was actual you could
see the machines lighting up when yeah, something was going on. It was
really interesting. I was over there from about ten whenever I went over at
ten till midnight, and then standing in the garage, were standing out in
the driveway talking till about twelve thirty. So I would like to go over
just sometime when they're not there and sit and communicate. Because she never touched
me, She never she talked through the voice box that they have type thing
directly to me started talking and she just said very clearly private. Yeah,
either keep it to yourself or what she was saying was, yeah, this
is private. Please don't talk about let's talk alone. I would love to
have an experience because I'm open to it. Don't have a problem with that.
I don't ever want to get involved with something in the level when they
say don't ever bring a Ouiji board into your home, because that's just opening
a door to something. I did a lot of reading and it was interesting.
Afterwards, my mother asked me, how did you feel? Then it
started hitting me that was really bizarre. The next couple of days I felt
real unsettled, glazed over Diane's hang and she said, I just seemed to
her eyes, we're just like like my mind was trying to process everything was
It's a weird feeling because I remember seeing her leave that day in the haunt
to go to the hospital. When they picked her up, I saw her
that blank look on her face. I knew she was dead leaving the house.
I've always thought that there is something, there's something more too, and
especially if you die violent death or not of your choosing type thing, or
even if you're choosing her violent life, that there could be residual left.
I felt like I needed to record these interviews because I was working on an
art project and I would pull quotes from audio to use on photographs of different
images. It was really important to me to document these stories, and I'm
glad I did because Nancy and Diane both opened up in ways. I think
they just wanted to tell their story. Honestly, I always do stuff with
Diane, I've worked with Diana Ton, but I think Nancy was just happy
to talk about her friend because I don't think a lot of people appreciate or
take that kind of experience seriously, Like talking to a dead person through a
recorder wouldn't might weird somebody out, but I was like, I'm here for
it. No, you had a conversation. If you have your own true
scary story that you want to share, please go to truscarystory dot com or
write to me at the email in the description of this episode to have you
on. If you have questions about it, just let us know. Up
next, be sure check out Scary Story Podcast. You can find it by
searching on your podcast app. Right now. Thank you very much for listening,
See you soon.