Sometimes, the stories we hear aren’t just tales, they’re warnings. Warnings from the past, from spirits that linger just out of sight, waiting for the curious to wander too close. In honor of Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates Mexico’s victory over the French at Puebla, these dark legends come to life. The line between myth and reality is razor thin. Listen carefully, because once you hear them, they’ll be seared into your memory forever. First, the screams sound like songs Followed by he comes from the stairs Finally in our last story, guilt has a scent Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Blair Bathory and what is this podcast about?
My dog began barking at nothing in the night, and when I peeked outside, I saw a tall, shadowy figure standing at the edge of the field. The creature turned toward me, its face a grotesque mixture of man and beast, and it said, You've been warned. Hi, I'm Blair Bathory, and this is the Something Scary Podcast.
Thank you so much for being here, whether this is your first time or you're one of the brave souls who join us every week. Sometimes the stories we hear aren't just tales. They're warnings, warnings from the past, from spirits that linger just out of sight, waiting for the curious to wander too close.
In honor of Cinco de Mayo, which celebrates Mexico's victory over the French, these dark legends come to life. The line between myth and reality is razor thin. Listen carefully because once you hear them, they'll be seared into your memory forever. First, the screams sound like songs. Followed by, he comes from the stairs. Finally, in our last story, guilt has a scent.
Before we get to our stories, I wanted to say hello to all of our new listeners. So excited for you all to be here and sending love to all of our fans and listeners around the world without whom we couldn't be here. Do you have a story you want to share? Send me an email at somethingscaryatsnarl.com. So, wanna hear something scary? La Llorona's deadly wrath.
Sometimes it's not the music you remember, but the silence that follows when someone disappears. Like in this story inspired by the famous urban legend of the woman in white. The Cinco de Mayo parade was louder than ever. Drums crack like thunder, trumpets slice through the spring air.
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Chapter 2: What is the legend of La Llorona and how does it relate to Cinco de Mayo?
Vendors shouted over one another, selling agua frescas, roasted corn, and neon toys that lit up like firecrackers in the dusk. I wasn't even supposed to be there. I was just tagging along with my friend Maya, her cousins, and her little brother Nico. I like parades the way I liked haunted houses. Fun in theory, but I never fully trusted the crowd.
Too many shadows, too many places to vanish into without a sound. We were posted near the riverbank, not far from where the floats looped around. A perfect view, Maya said. She was all glitter and flag stickers, filming every second for her story. Nico sat on the curb, slurping a mango palita. He was maybe nine, stubborn, sweet, and too curious for his own good.
Everything was noise and movement, a blur of color and sound, until the moment the crowd seemed too thin and the light shifted just slightly. That's when I saw her. A woman in white. Not costume white. Not mariachi white. Old-fashioned, tattered white. She stood apart from the crowd barefoot on the other side of the street.
Her hair was long, dark, and matted, like she'd been walking for miles through a rainstorm no one else had noticed. Her head was bowed. Her hands clutched her face like she was sobbing. She looked so out of place, too still, too cold, and no one else seemed to notice her. I opened Maya. Do you see her? That woman right there? Maya turned, scanned the street, and frowned.
"'There's no one there,' she said. I looked again. Gone. I told myself I imagined it. The music, the lights, the sugar rush from the elote. Maybe it had scrambled something in my brain. But even as I laughed it off, a chill climbed up my spine, and I curled behind my ribs like a warning. And then Nico disappeared. One second, he was on there. The next, he was just gone."
We screamed his name, tore through the crowd like a fire had been lit under our feet. I checked vendor stalls, porta-potties, and the grass near the sidewalk. Maya ran toward the floats. No one had seen him, but something inside me knew. I turned to the river. The sounds of the parade rapped and melted behind me, too loud, then too distant, like they belonged to another world.
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Chapter 3: What happened during the Cinco de Mayo parade story?
The grass was slick beneath my feet, the wind colder here, sharper. and she was there, waist deep in the river, her soaked dress floating around like petals peeled from a rotting flower. Her face was turned up pale, hollow, eyes black as the water. In her arms, Nico. He wasn't moving. I screamed. His name tore out of my throat like it didn't belong to me. She looked at me, opened her mouth.
The sound that came out wasn't a wail. It was a wound, a raw, cavernous cry that ripped through the world and bent it around her. It drowned the fireworks, the cheering, the music. Only I could hear it. I ran toward the water, but someone grabbed me from behind. Security, maybe? Or a cop? I thrashed and screamed and pointed. But when I looked back, she was gone. So was Nico.
The search lasted weeks. Helicopters, divers, dogs. His face plastered across telephone poles and bus stops. But no one found a trace. Not one shoe. Not one footprint. Just still water and silence. Except me. Three weeks later, Maya sent me a video. I didn't want to show you before, she wrote. But I looked at my stories from that day again and I saw something.
The clip was shaky, full of motion, music blasting, people dancing. Maya had zoomed in on a float shaped like a giant pinata. But just before the camera pans, you can see her. The woman in white. Not across the street. Not far in the background. Right behind Nico. And her hand is reaching out. I stopped sleeping.
I started hearing things, soft crying from the shower drain, from the hallway, from under my bed. I burned sage, covered mirrors. I even tried praying. And I don't pray. But one night, I heard her again. Not in my head. Not from a screen. Outside. Between the whoosh of traffic and the buzz of streetlights, I heard weeping. So I went to the river. I don't remember putting on shoes.
I just remember walking through the dark, drawn like a tide I couldn't resist. She was waiting. Floating just above the surface, her long hair suspended like smoke. Her eyes opened the moment I stepped onto the bank. You heard me, she said. Her voice was low and raw, like something torn from the earth. I whispered. I called for help, she said. No one came.
I stepped back, cold sweat dripping from my back. Give him back! She reached into the water, something surfaced small, soaked, pale. But it wasn't Nico. It wasn't even real. Just a bundle of cloth and mud like a memory rotted through. I lost my children, she said. rocking in in her arms. So now I find new ones. Ones who hear me. Ones who look. I'm not like you, I said.
But even as I said it, I knew the truth. I have looked. I have listened. And I have followed. Maya still visits the riverbank. She leaves candles, marigolds, sometimes a toy. People say they hear crying during fireworks shows now. like it's woven into the music. Every year, someone goes missing. A child, a teen, someone who turns their head at the wrong time.
They say La Llorona walks the parade route now. They say her cry echoes between the trumpet blast. They say if you hear her too close, it's already too late. And I believe them. Because now, sometimes, I cry too. And sometimes, someone answers. How many disappearances have been explained away just because the truth is too terrifying to consider? Would you be able to recognize a ghost in a crowd?
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Chapter 4: How does the narrator describe the encounter with the woman in white?
Two stories, but the second was more like a wraparound balcony, open to the air like a motel, with the staircase climbing up into the shadows. The upstairs had rooms that people would rent out here and there, but I remember them mostly being empty. I was playing alone when he first came down the stairs. He didn't say my name, and I didn't ask.
Children don't question things that feel ordinary in the moment. And somehow, he felt ordinary, like he'd always been there. A boy about my age, dressed in all white. a long-sleeved shirt and loose pants.
His hair was black and neatly trimmed, and his face was always in shadow, the backlight from the staircase outlining his figure and hiding any detail, like he stood just behind a curtain of light, not quite, of this world. He asked if he would play with me, and I said yes. We played in the dirt, made up stories for my dolls, whispered secrets to each other in the warm air.
He laughed sometimes, but the sound felt hollow, like it bounced back from upstairs and didn't quite reach me. He never touched the toys, only watched as I moved around them. Still, I felt less alone. Every evening, just before the house turned to silhouette, I waited. And every time he came down the stairs, same clothes, same unreadable face.
I never saw him anywhere else, never heard him in the kitchen. He never left footprints, but I was a child. I thought he was magic, maybe. or just a quiet friend. My mother met someone, an American. She packed us up in silence and tears. I left my dolls behind. My grandmother kissed my forehead and said we'd be back. I remember looking at the staircase one last time before we pulled away.
There was nothing there, but I swear the upstairs felt expectant. Years passed. I forgot, or thought I did. Life in America was bright and loud and busy. I watched cartoons. I buried myself in technology. I stopped going outside to wait for things. But something changed when I started visiting my grandmother again, when I was old enough to travel by myself. I was maybe 11 or 12.
I didn't play in the backyard anymore, but I would pass by the staircase, sometimes glance up and feel a tension in my neck. like a string pulling me to look closer. There was always something about the way the light fell through the upstairs hallway, how it never reached the bottom step. One evening, out of nowhere, I remembered him. The boy, I said casually to my grandmother.
What happened to the boy who used to come play with me? She blinked at me, confused. What boy? The one in white. He came down the stairs every night when I was little. She shook her head. Miha, you always played alone. I laughed at first. I thought she was teasing me, but she didn't smile. Just turned back to her sewing with a faint look of worry, tightening her mouth.
I asked my cousin that night. She remembered him too. Said she saw us playing once and didn't want to interrupt. My little brother remembered his voice. Said it made his ears ring. I thought I was vindicated. until I realized something was wrong, deeply wrong. If we all saw him, why did no one ever ask who he was? That night, I couldn't sleep.
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Chapter 5: What are the lasting effects of the La Llorona encounter on the narrator and Maya?
I saw myself in the dream playing alone, and then the camera of my mind pulled back, and I wasn't alone at all. He was behind me, not playing, watching, always watching. The last time I went to the house, something felt different. The upstairs had been walled off. My grandmother said no one was allowed up there anymore. They closed it, I asked. No, she said. He did.
I asked her what she meant, but she waved it off, muttering that the house was too old, that I shouldn't ask questions. But in her voice, I heard the same unease I had felt all those years ago, the same lump in my throat. Sometimes, when I'm falling asleep, I hear the soft sound of footsteps on the stairs, slow, deliberate. And I know they're not mine. I don't think he ever left.
I think he's waiting. Maybe for me. Maybe for someone else. If I can ever get my grandmother to open up about it, I'll share with an update. But one thing I know for sure, I never learned his name. And that was his choice, not mine. He is the one who is in charge, not me. What happens to the spirits we forget? Do they forget us too?
If you spent years playing with someone only to learn they never existed, would you trust your memories or fear them? Let me know in the comments what horror movies you're watching right now. And follow me on Letterboxd to see the movies that I'm watching right now. I recently saw Sinners and I absolutely loved it. It's so good. If you get the opportunity, go see it in theaters.
If you didn't know, my other job full-time is I'm a horror film writer and director. And I'm so excited, like I said earlier, to start telling you about all these projects I've been working on in the shadows. So keep checking all of our socials for updates because I'm going to be sharing a lot of stuff really soon.
They say los caros, remember the dead, that if you're carrying grief through mountain roads at dusk, something ancient will notice. Yvonne had never believed that. She thought those stories were just warnings for kids who played too far from home, but that was before her uncle died, before the four of them had to make the drive up to bury him.
It was fall 2003, and the air in the Sierra Madre was already thin with dust and old prayers. They were running late, hours behind the rest of the family. The sun was low and fading fast. The road ahead, twisted like a snake made of dirt and rock. No pavement, no lights. Just the distant shape of mountains, rising like the bones of the earth. She was driving the old station wagon.
the one her Tio had used to haul lumber back when the town still had work. Now it smelled like gasoline, old plastic, and whatever was left behind from the last ride. In the passenger seat, Rose clutched a rosary behind her fingers, like it might break. In the back, Elsa stared out the window, and Lisa, her younger half-sister, kept muttering to herself in a whisper Yvonne couldn't make out.
Maybe a prayer, maybe not. No one was talking, but Yvonne could feel the weight of everything unspoken in the car. The tension rode between them like a fifth passenger. Then the car slowed. Yvonne's foot eased on the gas as her eyes narrowed. Something was standing in the road up ahead. A dog. At least, that's what it looked like at first.
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Chapter 6: What personal updates does Blair Bathory share with listeners?
No illness, no warning. And how she used to tell stories about the dog with two heads. She never asked what he'd done, maybe she should have. In the morning, Lisa was gone. No blood, no struggle, just an open window and a line of paw prints in the dirt that led to the edge of the trees and vanished like the thing I'd taken to the sky. People searched. The men yelled her name into the trees.
They blamed a coyote, a bear, anything but the truth. Only Donna said what no one wanted to hear. She saw something she shouldn't have, or remember something she tried to forget. Years later, Yvonne still sees the mountain road in her dreams.
The headlights, the dirt, the sound of tires on gravel, the two-headed thing in the dark, only now, in the dream, it walks on two legs, and it knows her name. She never drives that way anymore, but sometimes, when she's alone, she hears a soft click behind her, claws, just once, then nothing. They say guilt is a kind of scent, the kind that lingers, the kind you never forget.
Would you recognize a curse if you drove past it? Or would it follow you home wearing something familiar? Want to hang out with other horror fans and people like you and me? We have a Patreon where we talk about all things creepy, spooky, and weird. And I even go live there. So if you go to patreon.com slash snarled, you can meet up with other horror lovers like yourself.
And we can talk about all the latest news in the horror community and all the latest and best scary movies out there. So go to patreon.com slash snarled and I'll see you there.
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Chapter 7: What is the story about the boy who comes down the stairs?
This week's podcast stories were edited by Sarah Lukasiewicz, narration by Blair Bathory, audio edited and mixed by Fitz Harris, additional audio editing by Calvin Linderman, produced by Anna Villalobos, executive produced by Gil Gilman, music by Sapphire Sindalo and Calvin Linderman. If you have a story you'd like to submit, send me an email at somethingscaryatsnarled.com.
Don't forget to watch the video version of Something Scary over at youtube.com slash snarled. And if you'd like to support the show and everything we do at Snarled, join our Patreon at patreon.com slash snarled. So friends, as always, thanks for joining me. And please let me know in the comments if you like this extended version of the video and podcast.
We're really trying to connect with you more and I wanna talk to you about all things creepy and spooky. So let me know in the comments what you wanna talk about and what you wanna hear me say. Do you wanna hear more about my filmmaking career and all the horror movie icons that I work with? Do you wanna hear more about the... creepy places that I visit all over the world.
Let me know in the comments. I read every single one and I try to respond to as many as possible. Trust me, I am listening to you. So I will see you next week. Until then, sweet screams.