Darkest Mysteries Online — The Strange and Unusual Podcast 2025
Scariest Stories From Being Home Alone
20 Dec 2025
Scariest Stories From Being Home AloneBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/darkest-mysteries-online-the-strange-and-unusual-podcast-2025--5684156/support.Darkest Mysteries Online
Chapter 1: What is the first scary story about moving back into a childhood home?
Story number one. I never believed in ghosts. Or at least I never thought they'd come after a guy like me. I'm a middle school science teacher. My days are filled with grading homework and microwaving leftovers. My dad, though, he was the sort of guy stories follow. He passed last autumn after a heart attack. The kind that comes quick and leaves rooms to quiet.
After the funeral and all its noise, I moved back into my childhood house. The plan was simple. Catch up on bills, clear out his stuff. Ready it for sale. I didn't expect trouble. It's an old ranch-style place. Nothing fancy, but the pipes always groaned and the floors were never level. Two weeks after moving in, I first smelled it. Cigar smoke.
It was so strong in the kitchen that I gagged, coughing into my coffee. My father never smoked inside. Not once. He'd yell at me in high school for even thinking about it. But there it was, the sire, heavy stink. The kind that gone to your sweater after a party. I opened every window and checked the stove. Panicked, I left something burning. The smell faded by mid-morning.
I went through the cabinets looking for forgotten junk. Maybe an old ash-ray. I found nothing except some loose change and dried-up gritty packets. Two nights later, just as I was drifting off, I heard a faint tap-tap-tap above my head like a cane, rapping gently against the floorboards overhead. It was Rimmick, confident.
My dad always used his cane in sets of three tapping before he made his way to the kitchen. The first time it was almost comforting. I figured maybe it was the house setting or hot water pipes, but it kept happening. Same iron, same taps. Always three. Midweek, I started noticing other things out of place. My shoes shifted in the hallway overnight, one in front of the door like a barrier.
The garage door unlatched itself. Even though I'd sworn I closed it tight before bed, once I found the kitchen light turned down low at dawn and a quarter resting upright on its edge on the counter. I told myself I was just sleepwalking. stressed over the estate. Maybe hours, but the smells got worse and weirder. Some nights it was just cigar smoke, but sometimes it was his cologne.
Old spice and motor all mixed into a haze that made my eyes water. Once I woke up with the metallic taste of bourbon on my tongue, the same taste I get when he hugged me after his Sunday drinks. Friday night, a week after the first smoky kitchen, I heard the cane tapping closer down the hall toward my room. The air felt heavy, like the house was stuffed with cotton.
I lay perfectly still as the tapping stopped right outside my door. Then nothing. I got up the courage to open it. Empty hall, though the air felt cooler, almost damp. My skin trickled from head to toe. I spent the next morning scrubbing the floors, dragging every rug outside, airing out the curtains. I checked for Moldeek's dead animals in the vents. My logical brain needed a fix.
I found nothing. I mean nothing. Saturday night around 2 a.m., I heard the faint jingle of his old keys. The same cut-out bunch. He'd always drop by the front door a tiny sound that used to mean he was home. After that, the dreams began. They started vaguely, him standing in the hallway half in shadow, chewing on a cigar. Just watching me as I slept.
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Chapter 2: How does the narrator describe the eerie events in the childhood house?
I wiped it off, a nervous laugh escaping me. By the end of the second week, things escalated. I started hearing muffled muttering under the kitchen window at night. Never words, just the cadence of someone. We're hearing old arguments. The cabinet slant shut at exactly 515, the time he always prepped dinner. The cigar sank onto my clothes until I shored it off.
I invited my cousin over just to prove I wasn't losing it. He said he smelled nothing.
I heard nothing. You're a grieving man. The mine's a weird place. That night, the house was as quiet as a grave.
When he left, the tapping returned louder. The final straw was subtle. Three weeks in, I fell asleep watching old home videos on my laptop, my dad half smiling. Cigarette never lit retelling family jokes. I woke from a dream of him shouting my name. My shirt, neatly folded on the nightstand, reeked of fresh burning tobacco, like someone had pressed the lid end into the cloth.
I tossed it in the trash. The next night, the shirt was tucked under my pillow, smelling only faintly of detergent. I have no idea how it got there. That's when I decided to move out. I packed up quietly, leaving half the closets untouched. I still don't know what I think. Maybe it was pipes, milieu, grief tricks, or sleepwalking triggered by stress. Maybe a lousy house with lousy locks.
But sometimes when I visit to check the mail, I catch a whiff or cheap cigar on the porch and hear the faint jingle of keys just beyond the lock door. I don't linger. Not anymore. Story number two. People like to say old houses have character. Usually that's good for the pipes rattle and the floor's gone. My upstairs apartment in that creaky triplex had enough character for three buildings.
I moved in during winter, right after Christmas, and the place welcomed me with a bitter cold that even my space heater couldn't swallow. The first time I noticed anything, I'd only just started to make myself at home. It was late, probably one or two in the morning, and I was up scrolling through my phone, half listening to the radiator clank.
Suddenly, through the plaster ceiling, I heard what sounded like a record player scratching out an altar distorted with a woman's voice softly humming along. I froze with my thumb in mid-scroll. No one was supposed to be up there. The landlord said the third floor hadn't been rented in years. I tried to laugh it off. Old music tearing through the walls. Maybe, maybe even my own phone glitching.
Though I know I wasn't playing music, but it kept happening almost every night that week. Usually the same time. Sometimes 215. Always the same song, a waltz or something close. Each time it played, it seemed to get a little bit louder until I started turning on the TV to cover the sound. But then the TV would turn to static the exact moment the humming started.
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Chapter 3: What strange occurrences happen in the upstairs apartment?
When I found it, the GPS was glitched, showing my blue location almost a block north, hovering in a spot that was nothing but woods on the map. I joked to myself that the house had shifted overnight. I didn't think more of it. The next morning, I walked the hallway to make coffee and stopped cold.
There was a door at the very end between the bathroom and the linen closet where there had been only a blank wall before. It matched the other doors, but was a little narrower, with a knob crusted in old brass and paint worn thin by hands that were men. I just stared at it, telling myself maybe I'd overlooked a storage nook I hadn't or was half asleep. I gripped the knob.
It was cold, almost moist and stiff at first, but I turned the hinges squealed as the door opened inward. A short sound, sharp like it hadn't been used in years. Inside was a small, windowless room. The first thing I noticed was the wallpaper. A floral pattern from another decade. Pale blue and olive peeling at the corners.
There was a rocking chair in the center inching, with a seat cushion so faded it looked more like dust and fabric. The room felt colder and the smell was musty, closed in odor, with a weird undercurrent or something sweet, almost rotten. On one wall hung a faded calendar from 1987. I squinted at it, then felt a shiver run up my arms. Tomorrow's date was circled in red marker.
The lamp on a nearby table flickered when I reached for it. Even though there was no plug, I didn't linger, closed the door behind me, then opened it again to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Still there. I choked it up to stress. Maybe my mind played a trick in the half-dark. I promised myself I'd check again later with better light. A few hours later, after work, the door was gone.
Solid wall, no seam. No sign and had ever been there. Paint unbroken. Baseboards. Flush. I ran my hands over the wall again and again, like an idiot, convinced I must have imagined all of it. The next night I woke to a creaking sound. That high seesaw whine of a rocking chair moving slowly back and forth. You know that sound? A hollow, scraping rhythm.
It drifted faintly from the far end of the hall when I sat up in bed. The night was silent again, but my skin felt canny, and I tasted metal in my mouth as though blood was coming from nowhere. The following day, my GPS did the same trick house dot drift in the mat, shitting me to the same one spot in the woods. This time the phone flickered and the compass spun wildly before starting.
I woke up that night to find the hallway light was on under the yellow glow. A pale rectangle of light outlined itself on the wall where that door should be. For the next several nights, the room appeared, but only in certain conditions. It was always after midnight, always when the wind picked up outside.
Sometimes the room was filled with shadows, black stains crawling through the wallpaper, the chair rocking wildly as if someone had leapt from it. One time the calendar had changed. The circle now stretched over a week. A single with the drawers sat in a cracked box by the door, and I could hear faint, hurried whispers like fragments of a conversation caught in the draft.
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Chapter 4: How does the narrator's experience in the condo escalate?
I started questioning everything. I set up my phone to record myself sleeping, but all I captured was myself tossing and turning restlessly, sometimes sitting up with my eyes wide open, staring across the room to where the journal was open. One grey morning, the final entry was waiting for me. You're almost ready tonight. You remember?
The rest of the page was blacked out, but I could see the faint imprints of more writing beneath, as if pressed hard and then erased. I stared at it for a long time as cold daylight crept through the blinds. That night, I locked the journal in a metal box in the closet and decided to sleep in another room. I had barely slept in the morning.
The box was still there, locked, but the journal was on the desk beside my bed when I entered the room open to a clean, untouched page. I haven't written in it since, but sometimes I wake up with ink on my fingers and the journal is still there, pages slightly fluttering as if waiting for my story to continue.
Maybe it's stress or some kind of sleep disorder and I'm scripting my own life by accident. Maybe it's just my mind looping in on itself, but each morning when I flip open that book pen in hand and I chill up my spine, I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm only half the author of my own story. Story number eight.
I was in my mid-thirties and I'd barely been in the house two months before the packages started. I'd never had my own place before. Every box on my new front porch set my heart racing with excitement. At first I thought the first package was just something I ordered and forgot. Moving in comms with a thousand little online purchases, but when I checked the label, I paused.
It was addressed to my home. All right, but to Mr. Harland Corridor. I'm not a mister, and there's no quarter in my family. I figured it was an old package finally making its way through a back fog, or maybe a neighbor's smell gone astray in a shuffle. It was a plain brown box, heavy, tightly taped.
Inside were three-bedded crime novels, pages yellowed and brittle, and a glass after dusty with what looked like ancient ashes. My hands and clothes reeked of old cigarettes after handling it. The book smelled musty like etiquette. I checked with the post office the next morning. The clerk shrugged. Returned to sender, she said, but there was no sender listed.
She stamped it and tossed it in a bin. A few days later, another package, same type, brown tips, gold label. But this one was for Valerie Cordell again, my house address inside a box of faded recipe cards, a single pink ribbon, and a photograph of a little girl. Her face half obscured by a sunbeam. I flipped it over in loopy blue ink. Someone had written for Val last summer.
It creeped me out, but my logic took over. Maybe the kiddos were former owners. Maybe their old friends were clearing out an attic and mailing fines to the only address they ever knew. But I'd already looked up the house online and found nothing in the records about any cordials. A week later, three more packages showed up at once.
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