House in the Last Town in California

Our story today is about a family who built a home in an area of
southern California where it was said was the place for immigrant camps. But the
all experience is terrifying. It might all be connected to the area. My
name is Edwin. The year is Matthew. True scary story. My name
is Matthew Cooper. This story starts in the southern California Desert, the last
town in California. Very dry area, very hot during summer, very cold
during winter, as typical to the desert. It was around nineteen eighty My
parents who were tired of moving from apartment to apartment. They were looking for
some type of stability for the family. At the time, they couldn't afford
to purchase a house. Within that area. There's a lot of low income
housing. They had a program at the time where you can build your own
house. It took a lot of effort from the community. It took the
whole neighborhood to be able to build these houses. That's what my parents decided
to do. They got involved with this program. They all worked to build
a house. My dad worked forty hours a week. My mother was a
stay at home mom. She worked jobs here and there, throughout the summer.
They worked together to build this house in a very rural part of our
county. Our house is located next to an agricultural field. At the end
of the block. There's what we would call it was a junkyard. What
it really was a storage lot for an electrical company word random commercial grade equipment
and things of that sort. Across from that was a location that an agricultural
farmer would store his tractors and various farm equipment. It was really rule.
There's only about five hundred people, maybe at a thousand. Everybody knows everybody.
Everybody knows everybody else's business. Word travels fast. The town had a
history of cams that people that build the railroad systems were forced to stay.
In these camps, people would echo just sentiments of Oh, there's a train,
I heard it going through by my house. Growing up, we never
noticed any railroad tracks. We always thought those stories were just folklore. We
did notice weird things when we would walk home from a friend's house in the
middle of the night, kind of that quiet where it kind of just consumes
all of the surrounding area. It would get quite eerie. From there after,
my parents within the neighborhood. It finally got to complete their house.
My mom and my dad had my sister and my older brother. It was
just them for a few years. All throughout the eighties, this is where
things started to happen, got a little bit more active. My mom would
sometimes get an eerie feeling. One day, my older brother, Timmy,
when he was still a toddler, he had a really bad fever, really
bad in the hundreds, one hundred and three hundred and four, something of
that sort. She, as any mother, would stayed up all night taking
care of him, giving a medicine, just trying to watch him. He
was in a bacinet next to their bed. They went ahead and went to
sleep. For some reason, my mom felt the urgency to wake up.
My mother woke up. She noticed a figure standing next to my brother,
standing over him on the side of the bed, next to the bacinet.
She was frozen. She couldn't move, she couldn't talk. She was trying
to utter words, but she just couldn't get him out. She was just
staring at this figure. She said it spoke to her in some telepathic wave.
She couldn't hear words, but she knew what it was. Saying,
and it kept just saying, I'm gonna take him now, I'm gonna take
him now, I'm going to take him now. She was trying to utter
no, no, no, no, no. She was just trying to
speak it to existed. It's trying to some way to get some words out,
but she couldn't. She started crying. She opened her eyes and it
was gone. My mom started to think there might be something here. She
got the house blessed, she called in a priest. Everything was kind of
quiet for a while. It wasn't until around nineteen ninety early nineties that my
elder brother was born. They were all living in the house at the time.
That's when things kind of started to pick up again. My mom would
say that when Michael was a around a toddler, Timmy was a little bit
older. Michael was around four or five, started saying that he had a
best friend in the house. He would tell her he's scary, he's ugly,
his name's Harry. It was weird because neither neither Timmy nor Tiffany had
ever had an imaginary friend. My mom, it was new to her that
Michael kept on uttering these words, Oh, it's scary, it's scary.
He wouldn't want to go to his room. He would look down the hall,
then tell my mom no, no, and then look down the hall
and tell her no. He didn't want to go down the hall. He
was just terrified. He did not want to go down the hall. He
didn't want to go to his room. He didn't want to be by himself.
He was always by my mom's side. My mom she felt something was
going on. She said, that's when they started hearing noises, footsteps down
the halls towards opening. And this was all previous to me being born,
and just things that were already lingering in the air in the house. Around
nineteen ninety five. That's when I'm bored. My parents are still living in
this house they build. They're extremely attached to it. They love this house.
They were already close to paint it off. Growing up, I didn't
really have much occurrences as far as I remember. When I was a sick
kids always in and out of the hospital, in and out of the doctors.
Other than that, it was fairly normal in my early years. It
wasn't until five years old, six years old, I started noticing I would
sleep in my parents' room. I would oftentimes stay up in the middle of
the night. I have real bad insomnia as a kid, or I would
just stay up a majority of the night watching TV or just laying in bed
in between my parents. I hear footsteps walking up and down the hallway.
I would just hear doors open and close, doors open and close. If
I look down the hall, no one's there. I'm thinking, well,
that's weird. I go laid back down. Then I hear it again,
look down the hall, No one's there. This time you being a kid,
I started yelling with my mom, like my mo ma mom, trying
to get her attention. She wakes up like half tires, like what And
I was like, oh, did you hear that? Did you hear that?
She's like, go to sleep, go to sleep. I would hear
that throughout the whole entire night, just footsteps, footsteps off them. All
was all always scared in the night. I remember house prior sixth At the
time seven, my mom was taking me to school. She was running late.
She was making breakfast in the morning, trying to hurry up, trying
to me to eat as fast as I could, while she was gathering her
purse. The car keys we run outside of the front door. She's pulling
me by my arm to hurry, hurry, hurry, and she turns around
to lock the front door. I'm just right there, standing next to her
with my backpack. On the side of our house, we had a chain
link fence. The chain lenk fence just instantly started shaking. Boom boom,
boom, boom boom. It just shaking back and forth and back and forth,
back and forth. It's a clear spring day, the weather was hot.
It's shaking in a way where it's being pulled forward, stops and then
pushed back, pulled forward, stops, pushed back, and we're staring at
it for a couple seconds. We're just watching this fence just viciously shake.
My mom doesn't say anything. She just looks at me, grabs my hand,
and she's like, let's go, let's go, let's go. That's
when I started to realize something was happening here. There was just no explanation
to the things that were happening at her house. I would still hear the
walking of the footsteps up and down. I would notice different things at the
house. It always felt eerie when no one was there. I'd be inside
playing video games or watching TV. Even times that you kind of were trying
to relax, it just always felt disturbing, like somebody was kind of watching,
somebody was there with you. We would talk about it. She couldn't
deny it anymore. It became something that was so visible to us that she
was like, well, I can't just keep on keeping this to myself.
I've already been here things, I've seen things, So I got to start
telling them. My mother, my father, they used to have to go
grocery shopping twenty minutes away because that's where the nearest door was. I'm waiting
at the house. She put my older brother, Michael. She told him,
hey, you know it, just make sure you watch them check on
him every now and then. My brother was already a teenager. He was
been to his own little thing. I'm watching TV and not thinking much of
it. It's probably around seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night. My parents
should be home any minute now. I just hear a knock, a loud
knock, then a pause and loud knock. The door starts shaking. Our
front door starts shaking. I'm watching the door shake, shake, shake,
as if somebody was trying to unlock it. I didn't think much of it.
I was expecting my parents to be home. I went and I unlocked
the door. All of a sudden, my mom comes running in. Boom,
the door flings open. She just instantly starts yelling, why do you
have the door locked? You guys are so paranoid. What caught me off
card was that my mom never cussed. She was very religious at the time.
She never cussed, especially towards That kind of caught me by surprise.
I laid back down on the couch. She's still yelling, just random profanity
so about the door being locked, about us being paranoid, that we're always
doing this and that. And at the time she's just locked eyes glaring at
me, just yelling. And I look at her and I say, oh,
you know what, Mom, I love you, Mom, I love
you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lock the door.
I'm sorry. She looks at me, stops talking, immediately looks me
straight in the eyes. It's just with the most I'd never seen this type
of glare on somebody before. Just hushers gives out a big sigh, walks
straight through our kitchen to the back door, and I as the back door.
When the back door slammed, my older brother came running out and he
comes running up to me. He's like, what are you doing. He's
like what are you doing? And I'll still lay down on the couch at
the time. He's like, what are you doing? I was like nothing.
I was just I'm just right here watching TV. He's like, what
was that? What was that? Why do you slam the door? And
I was like, that wasn't me. That was mom. He stopped.
He saw like no. I was like, it was Mom. She went
through the backyard. She was mad about the door being locked. He was
like, I just talked to Mom right now on the phone and she's still
at the store. I didn't believe him at the time. I was like,
man, stop messing with me. He stop playing around. Just you
know, stop trying to scare me. Stop trying to scare me. Because
we were always kind of playing jokes on each other. So I was like,
stop trying to scare me. Sure enough, my mother comes home about
an hour and a half later with my dad, and I started breaking down
and telling her what I saw. I just could not stop crying. They're
for sure or something here, there's no denying what I saw. I saw
it, my brother heard it. My brother was just telling my mom what
what I had told him. That's when she confirmed it for us, something's
happening. After that, everything went into full swing. My brother was still
very reserved. He spent most of his time in his room. He was
very into heavy metal punk music. My parents didn't understand it because they were
very old school. They didn't grow up with any of that type of music.
They had often tell them, oh, you're playing devil music in there.
He had long hair, he wore eyeliner, he wore heavy metal T
shirts that spiked bells, the spike bracelets, the whole thing. And then
so he started learning how to play guitar. He'd be playing his guitar all
night until my parents were banging on the door to get him to stop.
He would be at school to around five o'clock. He had to take the
bus walk home. I got home a little earlier. I would be home
by two thirty three o'clock. It would just be usually me and my mom.
My mom would be making diad hurt. We would hear music coming from
his bedroom. We would hear music being played. We'd hear the guitar being
strum. I would go up to my mom and be like, hey,
is Michael here, and she'd be like, no, he's still at school.
We thought maybe the TV was on. We'd go in there and check,
and sure enough, nothing would be on. This would happen over and
over countless time. We would hear music being played, the guitar being strum,
the sound of the amplifier being turned on, buzzing, and something being
strum his guitar pedals being pressed. Would constantly be hearing these noises coming from
his room. After that started happening, we'd notice different things. That's when
my mom decided to tell me about a time when we were younger. She's
at the house, would say, we're all at school. She heard somebody
call her name. She'd heard somebody say, Mom, I'm gonna try to
get her attention. She went and looked down the hall. She's seen a
little boy run to my brother Michael's room. She didn't know what to do.
She followed this little boy. She walks into my brother Michael's room.
She sees a little boy sitting with his legs crossed in my brother's closet,
just staring at her doesn't say a word. She just looks at this little
boy, backs out the door, closes the door, and she just goes
back to washing dishes. She kept this a secret from everybody for a while.
When we started hearing noises from his room, she finally confessed this to
us, that she had seen this. We were just mind blowed. As
Matthew grows up, he begins to experiment with the world of the paranormal.
His story continues right after this stay with her me and my cousin. She
lived down the street from us. She would come over. I would tell
her about the things that were happening there, and we would just do little
ghost hunting experiments. One day, me, my cousin, and one of
my friends, we were like, hey, there's this haunted house, or
everybody said it was haunted. It was this abandoned house that was located in
the middle of a field. We decided, let's go out there. We'll
try to film a ghost hunting episode. We ride our bikes a couple of
miles out. We arrive at the house. The house used to have a
kind of a chain to block from people getting in. We go around that
chain. We're standing around the house videotaping the exterior. My cousin's talk game.
We're just joking around. I just started counting this entities that we were
hoping that we're gonna see. I just start saying things like, oh,
if you're really here, then come out and show yourself. Come out and
show yourself. If something's really here, then show itself. We didn't notice
anything, so we're just like, ah, whatever didn't work. We start
riding our bikes back home and I stop and I'm like, let me look
at the at the video I just recorded. I flip out the little camera,
the little screen. I start watching the video. As I'm watching,
I notice in the video when we're filming the house, around the time that
I'm taunting and saying all these things, there's somebody peeking around the corner.
I zoom into it, and sure enough, there's nobody there. I go
to the side of the house. Somebody peeks around the corner. It's somebody
wearing an all white hood. They're looking at us with the all white hood,
just stared at us. I pick around the edge again. You can
see it. I go back. Then it's gone. I'm showing my cousin
and my friend this this guy's instantly chills. We were pedaling as fast as
we could back to town. It was getting darker in the middle of fields.
We start pedaling back to town. We get to my parents' house.
We leave the bikes there, but we are just trying to digress everything that
happened to us, just standing outside of my house in the front yard.
When we're standing outside of the house in my front yard, my neighbors about
two houses down come out screaming, screaming, completely just yelling. They're dragging
one of their guests out. I didn't recognize who the guy was. They're
dragging him out. They're just yelling, he's possessed, He's possessed. This
guy is screaming at the top of his lungs, Oh, I'm gonna kill
you. I'm gonna kill you, just completely yelling. They're pouring water on
his head. He's just gurgling the water, spinning out, yelling, gggling
the water, spinning out, yelling. My neighbors just start punching the guy.
I don't know what what they thought they were gonna, if they're gonna
knock it out of them or what, but they just start beating this dude.
We just see this at this abandoned house. We're watching my neighbors beat
this guy up. They're saying that he's possessed. My friend he started having
a panic attack. He was just terrified. It was just so many things
that are happening all within that date. We're gonna walk to my cousin's house
just to ease the nerves. She lives. All the way down the street
we're walking, we can hear rocks hitting our feet. We start seeing little
pebbles pass by our feet. They were getting thrown in front of us.
We would turn around, we wouldn't see anybody. In the process of trying
to calm my friend Dan, and he takes off ready we run after.
We end up running to this church that was a couple of blocks away from
our neighborhood. We just sit outside of this church for hours until he feels
comfortable to go back to my house. Finally, he feels comfortable. Right
when we get back to my house, instantly starts feeling the panic attack again.
He's like, I gotta go home, So he started crying. My
mom feels bad, and she takes him home. It started becoming folklore around
the neighborhood and at school. I would tell them the little stories about things
I would hear. Some of my friends would be like, nah, you're
lying. They didn't want to believe it. One day, a group of
buddies was like, all right, well, you know, let's spend a
night at your house. And I was like, all right, Like,
are you sure. It was about four or five of us. They more
like yeah, They were like yeah. I was like, okay. The
room that I had was this converted garage that my parents had converted. I
had my bed on one side of it. On the other side, I
had a futon, couch, a TV, a drum set in the corner.
It felt like a studio apartment just because of how big it was.
We're all trying to pick a spot. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna
lay on the bed. My other buddy laid on the futon. We all
found enough spot to crash out out. My buddy that was this huge denier.
He decided to sleep on the floor next to the drum set. We
try to stay up to. Around one o'clock in the morning, we all
decided it's time to crash out. I turned off the light. I fell
asleep perfectly fine. The next day, I wake up. My buddies awake
really early, super early, around seven am. He's the only one awake
at the time. When I wake up, he's already sitting up on the
couch. When I wake up, He's like, I'm never ever ever spitted
it at your house again. I'm never gonna come back and spit a night
here. He ended up telling us that after we all fell asleep, he
stayed up. He couldn't sleep. He was just laying there. My room
was incredibly dark. Once I turned off all the lights, he close his
eyes, said nothing. He said around maybe an hour two hours later,
whenever, After just laying there for so long, he heard somebody hit the
bottom of the drum set, which it made a loud dud, as if
somebody had kicked the pedal, and he was like, what. He turns
it, tries to look in that direction, but of course it's dark.
He starts haring a loud growl, like an animal's growl. They just started
getting louder and louder and louder. He's never had something like that happen to
him. He didn't even give it to really sleep because he was so scared.
It was just terrified. One day, my older sister and her boyfriend,
they were at the house, they were visiting. We were talking in
my room, my mom, my dad, and my sister and our boyfriend.
My brother Michael. He was in his rooms, or so we thought.
He walked into my mother's room and used their restroom. We're talking in
the room. My older brother comes running into the room screaming he saw something
in the window, that he saw somebody. The thing that caught me off
guard is that my older brother's about seven years older than me, so he
was terrified, terrified. He was crying, and he was telling my mom
and my dad what he saw. My dad and my sister's boyfriend ran outside,
ran around the whole house, looked at everything, looked all around it.
They couldn't find anybody. My brother tells us that when he was using
the restroom, he looked out the window and he saw a pale face just
staring at him through the window, just up somebody that looked dead. They
were just staring at him through the window. He instilly ran out right when
he saw that. One night, I remember the phone ringing really late at
night, and I remember carrying my mom get up and answered the phone.
It was like three of the morning. It was my brother Tommy. It
was weird that he would call so late. He was just telling my mom
that he was coming home, him and his buddy and they got into a
car accident, a really bad car accident. My mom calls my sister and
they all go to where my brother had this accident. They were trying to
get him out of the vehicle and they ended up pulling them out and flying
them to San Diego. Was in the ICU and me and my mom had
a talk. She had told me that a few days prior to that happening
to my brother, that she was outside in our backyard hanging up some clothes
in the middle of the night. She was upset, I think at my
dad at the time about something. She was in the backyard try to blow
some steam off hanging up the clothes. She looks down into the very end
of the backyard from the shadows. She sees the same figure she saw when
my brother was little. Walk from the shadows, it stood where she was
standing, but at the other side of the backyard, at one end of
the walkway. She was on the other side of the walkway. She froze
she went back inside. A couple of days later is when my brother had
his accident and almost died. She didn't know how to feel about it.
Fast forward now I hadn't moved out, have my own family married. It's
just my mom and my dad still in the house. It was like that
for a few years. It was just my parents in the house. My
dad passed away around twenty nineteen. He got sick, he was getting better.
Suddenly he passed away. It was just my mom in the house,
and we all took it really, really hard. I had went and stayed
with her because it was just too hard for her to take at the time.
My siblings would stop by often. I remember one day I was taking
a shower. I would take hour long showers and my dad hated it.
I'm in the shower, my mom's in her bedroom. All of a sudden,
I hear loud bang on the door, bang bang. I yelled to
my mom, what what do you need? What happened? And she's like,
I didn't do that. I heard that, but I didn't do that.
I get out of the shower and then I talked to her and she
just started to laughing, and she's like, that's your dad telling you to
get out the shower already. We just started laughing, thinking, Ah,
like it became so normal for us to kind of have these occurrences. We
could still feel like the presence of my dad in the house. It didn't
feel like he passed away there. I have been catch myself going in,
going home and kind of looking for him and then realizing like, oh,
yeah, you know, he's passed away. You could still feel his energy
in the house and still feel his presence. My mom would say the same
thing. For a while, there was a lot of grief, a lot
of gloominess around the house now that my dad's gone. It was just it
was just gloominess. Finally, I kind of let my mom be. She
was able to kind to be by herself a little bit more. I go
back to my family. I only live about a ten to fifteen minute drive
away from my mom's house. I'm always there either doing a project or working
on something or getting some stuff. I had left my PlayStation and I had
left it set up at our house. I went over there one day to
play it. I had my head said on. I was really into the
game I was playing at the time. I hear again a bang. I
heard a bang on the window. I'm yelling for what's up because it's just
me and her. What do you need? What do you need? I
kind of get annoyed because I'm trying to play this game well, thinking I'm
my mom's asking me to do something or it needs me for something. I
end up pausing the game. I go outside. I'm looking for I didn't
find her in the backyard. I go to the front yard. She's out
in the driveway sweeping. I'm like, hey, what's up. Why did
you knock on the window? What do you need? She's like, I
haven't knocked on the window. I've been out here the whole time. And
it was just things like that where it was just constant, like us thinking,
oh, man, like there's somebody it's my mom or it's this person.
And I noticed that these things would happen when you least expect it,
when all other things are gone from your mind. These things happen where it
just throws you through a complete like it makes your heart beat faster, makes
you start your palm sweaty, and it's just like what you know, if
if that wasn't you then, and things like that would just happen and happened,
and it was more innocent things like that. I remember another time that
I had stored some old vending machines at her house that was trying to like
start a venue machine business. I always try to have an entrepreneurial spirit.
I would just try to get her involved in anything I was doing to kind
of help her, kind of pass the time and not think about my dad
so much. One day, we're out late night. I would go after
work. We would try to paint up this venue machine, try to fix
it up a bit, and I'm trying to figure out what's what's wrong with
this venue machine. I'm asking her to pass me the cord to the machine
that's on the other side. These things are huge. I'm asking her.
I'm like, hey, Mom, passing me the cord. Pass me the
cord. I'm reaching behind to grab it. The cord ends up in my
hand. I was like, thank you, I appreciate it. I plug
it in. When I walk around to the other side of the machine,
my mom's not even there. She had went inside. She wasn't anywhere.
I go inside and I'm like, I was like, I thought you were
helping me. She's like, yeah, I got thirsty. I keep inside
and I was like, you didn't just have me the court. She was
like, no, I've been inside. I was telling and I was like,
man, whatever's here, it's helpful. And we just kind of laughed
it off because it was just so calmon. It would just go in these
waves. Things would happen and it would calm down, but catch us by
surprise. One day, I'm driving to my mom's house and I'm talking to
her on the phone. I kept talking to her the whole ride to her
house. I'm getting to her street. As I'm pulling up, my mom
drives this old white truck that she's had for years, since I was in
school. She still has it. She has a deep sentimental attachment to this
little white pickup truck she has. As I'm driving up to her house,
I see that she's sitting inside of the pickup truck. I'm talking to her
on the phone. I'm like, Hey, why are you in your truck?
What are you doing? She's just sitting there with her hands on the
sterea wheel, looking forward, and I'm like, what are you doing?
Like are you taking off somewhere or where are you going? As I'm talking
to her, asking her what she's doing. What I'm visualizing is her sitting
in the pickup truck. She's holding onto the cereo. I'm asking her on
the phone. She gets out of the truck, slams the door in the
truck, and starts walking towards the front door. And I was like,
yeah, you're going inside the house right now. She's like, no,
I'm inside already. And I look up again and I don't see anybody.
So I'm like what. And when I go inside, I finally, you
know, I park my truck and I go inside. I was like,
you were just sitting in your truck. Why are you sitting in your truck?
She's like, I haven't even been outside. I've been as I've been
talking to I've been here in the couch in the living room. I instantly
got the chills because it kind of just took me back to my childhood of
seeing all these things. How don't even know what to think. This was
about maybe last year. These things have been happening pretty much my entire childhood
to adulthood and continue to happen. My sister still lives very close to my
mom. She's the one that mostly goes and takes care of her. My
sister has some of her vehicles parked at my mom's house. One day,
she was getting in one of her vehicles at my mom's house. She's starting
it up. She hears the front door open. She's thinking that my mom's
gonna come out and read her. She watches both the front door and the
screen door open, both doors closed, and my mom never comes out.
She waited a while, nothing took off. She calls my mom when she's
running errands and she's like, hey, you know, I thought you were
going to come outside. My Mom's like, what are you talking about.
I'm not even home right now. I'm out with your grandma. Things occur
there, and my mom still lives within the house. She just says that
it's her roommate. It just became just second nature for things to happen at
my mom's house. That's pretty much how it is still to this day.
I think a big explanation was throughout my childhood, there was a lot of
issues that my parents were going through. We didn't really quite understand being kids.
That was probably what set the energy when we were younger, and we
kind of didn't really notice with us fighting amongst each other, my parents fighting,
It was causing all this kind of negative energy to manifest into something bigger.
My mom had looked into the property when they body, they didn't really
notice anything. There wasn't too much history on the land. Our biggest thing,
that's something that me and my mom talk about to this day, was
I just think there was just a lot of angry energy. It just manifested
itself into something spiritual. That's always been our explanation to it. When my
dad passed away, energy came back where everybody was sad and my mom couldn't
stop crying. That's when it started happening again. Her story by going to
true scarystory dot com and filling out the form. But next, check out
horror Story, where I tell you about true horror events, mysteries, and
haunted places. Find it by searching for horror Story on your podcast app.
It's the podcast with the yellow letters. I'll talk to you over there.
Thank you very much for listening to you. Soon