That now, the thugs started getting louder and louder, to the point where the last time that had happened, it sounded like a gunshot.

Tonight's story comes from a family who lived four years with something lurking behind their walls, something tied to a mysterious sealed safe left behind by the Holmes original owner.

My name is Edwin, and here is Reuben It's true scary story.

I was born in El Paso.

Shortly after I was born, my parents moved to a small town in Texas called Odessa.

My mother says that they moved into a small, two bedroom house.

She was always very scared to be in that house, especially when it would get dark, to the point where she would ask my dad to get up and go with her to the restroom in the middle of the night because she was just so.

Fearful of being alone in that little house.

She says, I used to wake up crying all the time, which is normal for a baby, except for the fact that one time I woke up crying and I just wouldn't stop.

She says that they found three marks on my back, as if something had scratched me.

She says that that really freaked her out and convinced my dad to move out of that little house.

They ended up moving back to al Paso.

My uncle, which lived still lived in Odessa.

He tells them that when they moved out of that little house, that the next tenant was a middle aged woman, and he says that about a week after she moved into the house, they found her inside the house crawling around like a snake.

Nobody knows what happened, and they couldn't get her out of that state, and so he basically says that you know that she went crazy.

My parents always tell me that thank god they moved out of that little house.

The other story that my mother tells me about when I was young, we were at my grandmother's house.

Everybody was in the dining room just kind of talking, and I was in one.

Of the rooms by myself.

She says I was about four years old, and that I came around the corner yelling or crying.

She says that there was two large black dogs and that I said that they had red eyes.

Everybody kind of got up and went to look to see if maybe two dogs had gotten into the house, but they never found anything.

She says that that I just kept repeating it was two big black dogs with red eyes, and so she is.

She always reminds me of that occasion.

When I was twelve, I started hearing my name getting called very often.

It would either wake me up when I was about to fall asleep.

Sometimes it would be a whisper, sometimes it would be a yell.

And that started happening pretty regularly.

It would be both in private and in public.

I'd just be sitting somewhere with my family and I would just hear somebody say Reuben.

And I would turn around.

Nobody was calling my name, and so that became kind of a regular thing for me to where I kind.

Of started ignoring that.

From around the age of twelve to like sixteen.

That was the only thing that would happen.

I turned about sixteen seventeen, I started seeing like shadow figures out of the corner of my eye.

Never thought anything of it until my brother also said that he was seeing shadow figures or like if somebody would walk by fast.

So then that's when I.

Started talking to him about some of the things that were happening to me.

It would get kind of weird because we would both be sitting somewhere and we'd both see the same shadow figure just walk by, and we'd both look at the same time, and we kind of knew, you know, what was happening, and that would happen multiple times, and then it would happen, you know, as by myself as his, but he is by himself.

And then it started getting a little bit weirder.

At this time, we were living at my grandmother's house.

We would share a room in that house, so we had like two twin beds up against the opposite walls.

He told me one time that he saw something small, maybe about a foot high, run under his bed out of the corner of his eye.

I started seeing something similar.

It only happened about twice to me.

It would happen more frequently to him, where he would say, look, look, did you see that?

And I would look and there was nothing.

I don't know if you remember, but the beds used to have kind of like a drape on the side where you couldn't see under the bed, so we would see that fabric move as if something had actually rolled under there or gone under there.

And we would always check because at the time we had a little Chihuahua dog, so you know, we knew that.

You know, in fact, it could be when it could be our dog, right, she could have gone under one of our beds.

But that's why we would always check.

Every time we would see that, we would always check under the bed to see if it was our dog, and it never was.

It never was.

As I went to college, everything kind of stopped for a while.

We kind of both just stopped telling each other anything that would happen.

When I graduated grad school, my wife and I we moved to Houston for work.

I ended up getting a job in San Antonio after about four years, so we moved to San Antonio.

We moved into this home where we're currently in.

The home was built in the mid eighties and we bought it from an elderly couple who my wife had befriended.

They sold the house to us directly.

The interesting thing about this house is they had said that they had previously bought it from a doctor that used to live here.

They disclosed that there was a small safe in the master bedroom closet on the floor that had never been opened by them.

They just said that they never got around to it that you know, they thought there was nothing in it because you know, they thought, but if there was something in that, the doctor might have taken it.

So they just never got the code to that safe.

I was always curious, you know, there was there's a safe in our house that hadn't been open and you know, over twenty years, and I said, Oh, for sure, I'm gonna I'm gonna end up opening that safe.

It's a small safe.

It's about a foot by a foot.

It looks like it's about a foot in depth as well, so it's a small cube.

I kind of forgot about it for a while.

I just never got into it.

We had remodeled the house and I just got busy with work and the kids, so that safe kind of remained unopened.

And then about a year after we moved into the house, it's when things started to happen here.

We had three dogs.

There were a black.

Lab, a yellow lab, and a chocolate lab.

Basically where the closet is on the other side of the back walk to that closet, it's a cavity under the stairs that we into a doggy house.

I didn't notice it at first, but she would sit in the doggy house but facing inward at the back of the wall, and she would sit there staring at the back of.

The wall for hours.

We started paying attention to it, and I started noticing that, you know, while she was just sitting there looking at the back of it, and it's.

Not like she was asleep.

She was just sitting there with her head up, staring at the back of the wall of the doggy house, which on the other side basically is our closet and the.

Safe underground, right, And she would just sit.

There and all of a sudden she would start wagging her tail, and then she would stop.

Maybe after another twenty thirty minutes.

Again she would start wagging her tail for like a few seconds.

And then she would stop.

And I thought that was really weird, almost as if, you know, somebody was.

Playing peekaboo with a dog or something to where they're very still and then all of a sudden they start wagging the tail.

Then they're really still.

One night, I was asleep and I heard something in the kitchen.

You know, I just kind of brush it off.

You know, sometimes when you stack dishes, you know, they do slip and fall, and it would happen again and then again, to the point where I said, hey, this is kind of weird.

I'm going to start screen grabbing some of the CCTV cameras that we have in the house, just to take some data for myself.

So it would happen, a dish would fall, and then I would just grab it from the CCTV and i'd you know, save it on my phone.

It started happening over and over to the point where, you know, I started questioning, Okay, there's what's going on in the kitchen.

Do we have a rat or it's something moving.

Through the kitchen.

I really started questioning it.

We're all asleep.

It was about two in the morning, and I started hearing voices, a woman's voice.

Kind of in my sleep.

And you know how when you toss and turn, you're kind of semi conscious and you could kind of, you know, know what's going around you, but you're.

Kind of still a little bit happy sleep.

It sounded like there was a woman outside of our house in the backyard.

It sounded very muffled, and I couldn't make out what was being said.

I got up and I checked.

I said, is there's somebody in her backyard?

And there wasn't.

I ended up just falling asleep, and the next day I remembered about that, and I said, hmm, that was weird, and so I went back to the footage and I ended up catching a whisper in our room.

It was so distinct because the cameras are way high, and the whispers sounded like it was next to the camera.

That's the first time that I said, WHOA, something's going on here.

The dishes you could brush off, or the dog just sitting there.

You know, we can't really explain that.

But when I heard a whisper in the middle of the night in our room that wasn't myself or my wife, that's when I really started saying, Okay.

There's something going on here.

I'm going to start really paying attention to what's happening around us.

When I went back to that recording, I really started to listen.

And the weird thing is that the whisper seemed like it was calling out my mother's name.

I mean, I was really weirded out by that.

And I let her know and I said, you know, this happened, and I sent it to them.

My parents are very religious, the very devoted to their faith, and.

Immediately they started praying for the house and for us during the time that I was hearing whispers.

I had become a light sleeper, and the daughter that sleeps upstairs, she would come down in the middle of the night because she had a nightmare, something which was common, right, And so one night I heard it crying and I immediately looked up and I expected her to come walking down the stairs.

I didn't hear anything.

I didn't hear any steps, I didn't hear anything.

So I got up, checked the stairs, and I checked.

Her room, and she would sound asleep.

The next morning, I looked.

At the camera again and you can hear a crying of a woman in our bedroom, and so I called that.

Video that good NA.

About two or three weeks after that, in the middle of the night, I heard a baby cooing in our bedroom.

And at this point my daughters are six and eight.

They definitely don't sound.

Like a baby.

My wife sound asleep, and again I next morning, I looked in the camera went back to when I woke.

When you can and see me waking up at night, and you can clearly hear a baby cooling in our bedroom.

There's one occasion where both of my daughters were playing when was on top of the stairs.

The other one was kind of like on the bottom of the stairs.

They were tugging and pulling on a balloon.

My older daughter was kind of pulling the balloon, my younger daughter was holding the string and she let it go kind of like as a you know, you kind of tug in and you let go to see if somebody falls.

And when she did that, they laughed, but there was another laugh.

It sounded like a kid, to be honest, but it was clearly not one of their laps.

That's one of the times where I thought, is it a spirit of maybe a kid or something, because.

You can tell that the laugh was because of how they were playing and what had just happened, so it was clearly paying attention to them.

I recognized it right away when it happened.

And then again I ended up up just going back to the video and rescreen recording that.

And yeah, in the video, you can.

Clearly hear them laugh, and then you hear a distinct laugh that isn't of my daughters.

During the time that I would hear whispers, there was orbs that were flying around in our bedroom.

You know, sometimes you look at videos of orbs and you think it might be you know, it might be dust or something, you know.

A particle of flying in the year.

The orbs that I caught were really weird because they would float around and they would almost be pulsating, and then there would change direction and they would just float up, float down, float out of view of the camera.

Up to that point, everything was happening at night, right in the middle of the night.

In two three four in the morning, one day, we were at the house and my wife said she was going to go to the store.

She was going to take the girls with her, and at the same time I was going to get in the shower.

I said, okay, that's fine.

We said bye, right, and I got in the shower.

I got out of the shower and I heard her yell something.

It sounded like I was coming from the living room.

I was confused because she had said she they were about to leave, right.

So I walked out of the room and I said, are you guys still here?

I just stayed there in silence to see if she would respond, and she didn't respond, and so I checked and no, they weren't here.

So I immediately went to my phone.

I pulled up the camera that was in my bedroom at the time that I heard her call my name.

I captured a thump and then a growl in my bedroom.

Whispers are one thing, but a growl that sounds bad.

So I immediately recorded that and sent it to my brother, send it to my parents.

They're like, well, you need to be careful.

That really does not sound good at all.

And things were just getting really weird, and my wife just kept saying, no, nothing's happening.

You're imagining things.

And I'm trying to convince her of the things that are happening because I have evidence of.

It, and she just would not give it to time.

Today.

Most of the times it was just me.

They would hear it.

There was one or two.

Times where she would wake up because of the loud sound and I would she would just see me get up.

I would go check.

There was never anything that I found.

I'd come back and and it got to the point where she would just wouldn't ask anymore.

She just at first she asked me what was that, and I just I don't know.

But it happened so many times.

At the end, she just would see me get up, come back, and she wouldn't even say anything.

Things just kept falling and everything else would happen at night again, we'd hear a dish or i'd hear, you know, a whisper, and then all of a sudden, instead of a dish and instead of a whisper, I would hear a large thump in our living room, as if something had fallen, something large, like if even like when a broom falls and it slaps on the floor.

It's a really loud sound, right, And I would get up in the middle of night when I would hear that, and I'd go check and there was nothing, and then I'd just go back to sleep.

And then again I would just screen record the next day, just to have, you know, evidence that there was something happening in our house.

I would always get up and check because I was always afraid that somebody was trying to get into our house.

When we were in Houston, we almost had a break into our house, and so I would always get up, no matter how little the sound was, I would always get up to make sure that somebody was trying to get into the house.

And I captured this maybe about six times that I captured that loud slap that would happen in the middle of the night.

That loud thump started getting louder and louder, to the point where the.

Last time that it happened, it sounded like a gunshot.

I never ever found out what that sound was.

I never found something on the floor.

I never found, you know, something that had fallen off a shelf or a picture or anything that had fallen off the wall.

That sound just seemed to be coming from nowhere.

One day, my wife was leaving.

This happened in the morning.

We around seven o'clock.

She was leaving the house with the girls, you know, to drop them off and to go to work.

My daughter's room is upstairs.

As we were all out the door, she heard this as well.

It sounded like books falling from a shelf upstairs.

We looked at each other like that was weird.

It's funny because up to this point, you know, she was always brushing off everything.

She really doesn't believe that anything was happening in this house.

And she said, well, if you give something thought, you're gonna you know, don't think about it.

You're giving it more power energy.

And she would just always literally stop me there.

She wouldn't want to see my videos.

She really wouldn't want to.

Hear about what I heard or anything like that.

And that day when she heard the books fall, she looked at me and kind of like, what was that?

And then she just walked out of the house and I immediately went upstairs to my daughter's bedroom.

There was nothing on the floor.

The books were on the bookshelf, so.

I immediately went back.

I had a camera in my daughter's room upstairs, just to you know, to make sure that she was okay during the night.

I recorded that as well, and you can clearly hear in her bedroom books falling, but nothing fell.

There's one instance that my wife doesn't acknowledge.

There's no choice for her to dispel it or not, because I cut it on video and she saw.

The evidence from it.

At the entrance of our house, we have kind of like an entrance table or entrance shelves type bee It's almost like a ceramic pencil holder that's at the front there on the shelves.

It's always sat at the back of the shelves and it's never moved.

It's always been there.

One night we heard it drop.

I got up and she got up.

The ceramic pencil holder was on the floor and it was broken, you know.

I picked it up, put it back.

I grabbed a video of it, and in the video it's a little blurry, if you can still make it out, you could see clearly this pencil holder.

It just falls off the shelf like two in the morning and it breaks, and we still have it there, and it's crack.

It's broken, like there's a piece of it missing because of that fall.

But that's literally the one thing that she cannot say that it didn't happen.

It was eleven o'clock.

I heard something fall upstairs, which at this point was very common.

You know, it was happening all the time, but this time, I don't know what it was about that, and I don't know if it was the sound, but it really did scare me that time.

I was like, it felt like something else was in the house with me.

It really was something that up until that point I had not felt.

I felt like I was in danger for some reason.

And I said out loud, I don't know who you are or what you're doing here, but you need to move on.

You're no longer welcome here.

And from that point on nothing happened.

That was about two years ago.

I don't know if you know I released whatever it was, it was here, or or maybe if I asked politely, But I really think that that's what it was, because that's the one and only time that I actually tried to communicate with whatever was happening here.

I'm just glad that whatever it was or whatever things they were, they listened to me.

But I'm more glad that nothing really happened to my daughters, or even to my wife, even if she didn't believe they never experienced anything.

It was always me that listened to the things, that heard the things.

The safe that was in my closet.

So it still remains unopened.

I don't know.

I mean, I think I eventually will open it.

I don't think there's anything in it, to be honest, I think it might have just been coincidence.

You know, where my dog was staring at the wall, it was on the other side.

My dad always asks me about it, and he always wants to be here when I open it, you know, to help me.

And also, you know, like I had said, because they were very devoted to their faith, he wants to be here to be praying while all this stuff was happening.

You know, when family members would come into town, my parents would pray for the house, they would pray for us.

My mother in law when she would come into town, she would always spread holy water all over the house as well, and everybody was aware of that stuff was happening in our house.

And but yeah, so I think one day I'll open that safe.

Fast forward about six months after I had said that, and nothing happened.

In the house.

This random thing happened to me where I went to an outer parts store to buy oil.

I went to the back of the store.

There was only an employee at the front at the register, and so I went to the back of the store.

I was trying to figure out which oil to buy, and all of a sudden, a plastic funnel from one of the shelves that was near flew off and landed at my feet.

I kind of just laughed because it seemed to be.

That things were only I was either I was attracting ghosts or something that it would only happen to me, And I remember thinking, like, of course it would happen to me.

I picked up that funnel, put it back on the shelf.

I ended up grabbing the oil that I needed.

I went to the front of the store and I told the guy at the front.

I said, man, you guys got some pretty good air conditioner in here.

You know, it's knocking stuff off the shelves.

And he just laughed and he asked me what happened, and so I explained what happened, and he said, oh, no, that we do have good air conditioner in here, but that was Richard.

This place used to be and they say it used to be an old barn and some guy Richard got killed in here after having a fight or whatever.

You know, we see things here all the time.

We hear things all the time.

We've caught orbs on the camera.

And at that point I was it was kind of comical, you know, that it would.

Present itself to me.

So at that point I was like thinking back to everything that happened in my house, and it happened to me growing up, and even the things that happened to me when I was a kid that I don't remember.

I was like, what is it about me that things happened around me?

Paranormal things happened regularly, but that was the last thing that happened to me.

In general.

I come from technical background and you know, really hard scientific, you know, evidence based.

Now, like nobody can convince me that there isn't stuff around us that we cannot see or explain or measure.

Just based off of my own data.

I was just trying to gather evidence and it eventually ended up convincing me because I have it on video.

Maybe if I wouldn't have recorded anything, maybe I have just thought that I was going crazy.

It's very clear that there's things that happen around us that we do not see, whether there are other frequencies, whether it's people that haven't moved on, whether it's angels, demons, or even as I thought at one point, maybe there's like an overlaying, you know, dimension that's happening at the same time that we're here that sounds kind of creep into our dimension.

I have no idea.

All I know is that I'm a firm believer that there's things happening around us that we can't see.

It did change my outlook, you know, on the world and to be aware that there's definitely more than what we see.

Beg you, Ruben for sharing your story with us, and if you want to share your own, head on over to true scarystory dot com.

This episode was edited and sound designed by Sarah Borhez Wendel a VW sound with additional production by me at Kbarubias and the Scary FM team.

You can get in touch with me through our website or find me on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook as edwynd Cove.

That's E d w I n.

C o V.

Until next time, Thank you very much for listening, Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.