My grandmother lived in a haunted house. She had not set out to. When she bought it, the previous owner had recently died, and the place came to her exactly as he left it: his furniture in every room, his dishes still in the cupboards, his clothes still hanging in the closet. She changed nothing. Years later, some of those clothes were still hanging right where he had left them.
He stayed too. Lights switched on and off on their own. We heard footsteps in empty rooms and voices with no one speaking. The toilet would flush by itself down a dark and empty hall, which my grandmother found more rude than frightening. She was never afraid of any of it. When it got to be too much, she would simply call out, “Mister Gardner, you’re scaring the kids. Stop.” Usually, that was enough.
I grew up on a farm in Central California, and I was sure I knew every inch of it. But the ground was keeping something. It was an accident. I unearthed human bones, and what I had found turned out to be a previously unknown site of a Native American massacre, forgotten until that day. The area was cordoned off, and the remains were carefully moved to native land so they could rest somewhere they would be honored. I was standing at the edge of a history everyone had forgotten was there, ten minutes from my own back door.
I carried that with me. Years later, I became a documentary filmmaker. The work sent me all over the world, and everywhere I went, people told me things. A stranger would lean in and describe the night something impossible happened to them, something they had never told anyone, something they could not explain and could not forget. I filmed in the places these stories cling to: old castles, shuttered prisons, abandoned asylums, ancient graveyards from Ireland to Istanbul, and houses where the cold settles into a room for no reason at all.
At some point I realized these accounts were going to disappear. The people who carried them would pass on, and their stories would go with them, unheard and unsaved. That felt like a loss I could not accept.
My grandmother taught me something in that house that I have carried ever since: the dead are not only frightening. They can be strange, stubborn, and at times even funny. A house full of ghosts can still be a house full of laughter. That is why our live shows are Delightfully Terrifying. They are built to scare you, but also to delight you, because that is exactly how I first learned to live alongside the dead.
Everything we make comes from one conviction: that these stories are true, that they belong to real people and real places, and that they deserve to be preserved before they vanish. When a story is documented, we treat it as fact and we tell you where it came from. When something is only a legend, we say so. We do not embellish the dead. We keep company with them, the way my grandmother taught me.
Ryan Azevedo
Producer – Terrifying True Stories
Real places. Real history. Most of them closer than you think.
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