CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "I was hired to look after empty buildings for big companies" Creepypasta

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

CREEPYPASTA STORY►by OrganicProzac: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comm...Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rat...her than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...CREEPY THUMBNAIL ART BY►Antoine Boutin: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/d2aqASUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7YCb...►"Personal Favourites"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEa2R...►"Written by me"- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX6RA...►"Long Stories"- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter: https://twitter.com/Creeps_McPasta►Instagram: https://instagram.com/creepsmcpasta/►Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/creepsmcpasta►Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CreepsMcPastaCREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪-This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only-

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Starting point is 00:00:01 Not sure if you're aware of this, but there is an epidemic of unused buildings in cities around the world. Big companies purchase these buildings during times of economic downturn. Nothing a few offshore investments can't weather. So these companies use their unaccountable funds to buy the establishments of those who can no longer afford their mortgages. The investors pour money into the buildings to prepare them for whatever kind of business the new owners have planned. We're talking full renovation, gutting the place, re-carpet, Re-plaster, repaint, renew. Of course, the economy is a fickle mistress.
Starting point is 00:00:39 Sometimes, just as quickly as these once-thriving buildings are bought up and emptied out, they're forgotten about. Maybe the companies that buy them go bankrupt. Perhaps a new opportunity arises, and they seek that out instead. It's also possible they simply buy so many of these buildings that they just forget how many they own. That's monopoly for you. As soon as you've bought up the oranges and reds, no one gives a damn about the browns.
Starting point is 00:01:06 The result is you get these magnificent buildings around the city centres, brands spanking new insides, all eggshell walls and navy blue carpets devoid of any purpose. Barron. The companies don't need to use them for anything. Their money comes from elsewhere. To turn them into anything else would come at a high price, and to sell them on would mean losing an asset, which cost them nothing and could be worth a great deal more in the future.
Starting point is 00:01:35 So, they sit there, slowly rotting. Or at least they would. If not for me. These conglomerates hire me and my crew to go around and tend to their empty fortresses. We do a bit of cleaning, sweeping up cobwebs and making sure black mould doesn't have a chance to grow. We also check the buildings plowing in electrics are still in workable order, if and when the place is put put back to use. However, what they really hire us for is a kind of unspoken responsibility. We have the added bonus of scaring off the miscreants who infest those pristine places.
Starting point is 00:02:15 No, not rats or insects. We can poison those. I'm talking about much larger vermin, far more hazardous to the market value of a property. Squatters. Squatters, for those of you don't know, are people who take a residence in a place without the consent of the property owner. There are all kinds of squatters. You get your hippie libertarians, free the whale, legalize it man types. This group talks big,
Starting point is 00:02:44 pretending to know the laws and threatening to use Daddy's lawyer when we tell them the party's over. But one look at Big Greg and they're usually out the door trouble free. Next, you have your homelessness. I feel kind of bad for this group. They need a place to show,
Starting point is 00:03:00 shelter. No support network to help them out, an inadequate protection from the government, to prevent them slipping through the cracks. A lot of them suffer with mental illness or drug addiction, often both, that makes them volatile, unpredictable. They're the reason we wear stab vest. One of my guys got bitten by one of these people a while back when we were cleaning out an office block that never was, developed a nasty case for hepatitis C. Poor guy. Expensive mess that one. God bless insurance. Things can get dicey when we're dealing with mental illness or drugs.
Starting point is 00:03:38 Most of the time, when things go south, we just step outside, call the cops, let them deal with the situation, then install extra security measures around the building, and be done with it. If we're up to me, I'd use the buildings as shelter, a place for these people to get their lives back together. I guess it would require permits, licenses, paperwork, trouble. The companies can't be bothered with all of that. Not when there's money to be made. Anyway, I don't get paid to enact social change. I get paid to evict, secure and repaint.
Starting point is 00:04:14 Maybe if these groups didn't make such a vile mess of the buildings, the owners would be more likely to accept them. I guess picking up after yourself doesn't factor high up on the list of priorities when you're out your mind on heroin. You'd have thought meth heads would relish the cleaning, a chance to turn their rotted brains a task, but they seem to be more content with tearing up the carpets, scratching up the plaster,
Starting point is 00:04:38 and digging away at the concrete. I have no idea what they're trying to find. They probably don't either. The trust of Ferran kit have apparently never been spanked for having an untidy bedroom either. Most of the defacement is graffiti, most of that lame tags and bad drawings of genitals. Every now and again, a real artist shows up. almost feels like a shame to blast their work off the eggshell. Or the other art just feels like a waste of time.
Starting point is 00:05:08 I guess it must have been about a year ago that I started noticing the schools cropping up. At first I thought it was the work of some tagger with a horror fetish. Three schools linked by some kind of rope, mouths open, screaming at each other. Creepy, sure, but that wasn't the weird thing. What really stuck out was the medium. The logo was spray painted in some buildings, in others scratched into the walls, crude versions made on basement floors in food waste or, in a few cases, human excrement.
Starting point is 00:05:42 We had to call the cops a few times for the symbols alone when we found the schools painted in blood. The police caught those buildings off, brought in their crime scene guys. It mostly came back as animal blood. Rat, pigeon, cat, dog. A couple of times it tested as human. Never any bodies, but enough blood to suggest, there must have been one. The newspapers got a hold of the story. I got my name of the paper and everything.
Starting point is 00:06:11 They hypothesized who was some kind of homeless, drug addict, trust-afferring cult operating out of these buildings. There was the standard circus after the moral panic. Must have been a good time to own a security company or CCTV wholesalers. But nothing ever came up. it. When the police failed to link the skulls to anyone, the media got bored and moved on to the next outrage. When I say these symbols appeared in abandoned buildings, I mean abandoned. That was the other strange thing about these schools. They always appeared in buildings showing
Starting point is 00:06:46 clear signs of squatters, but there were never any squatters to be found. We found all their stuff. The sleeping mats, tin food, clothes, even wraps or whatever they mean. shooting or smoking, but never any people. I don't remember ever really getting scared working this job before those damn schools showed up. Even the crustiest junkies always felt more like an annoyance than a real threat. These buildings felt alive. That's the only way I can put it. I could be walking through a room with vaulted ceilings, blue skies pouring light in through the room height windows,
Starting point is 00:07:23 and still feel claustrophobic, like the walls were breathing. I'd be power washing the carpet and feel the presents creep at my neck, spin around and nothing there. The boys didn't want to admit they were spooked, and I'd be damned if I was going to admit it to them. But we wordlessly agreed to start working in pairs as we checked the buildings and cleaned up after the missing squatters. Funny that a job involving evicting drug addicts could get more grim when the drug addicts aren't there. It must have been three months after the school showed. up, that I lost my first guy. We didn't even notice Tim had gone until the end of the day when we were getting ready
Starting point is 00:08:04 to drive back to the depot, found his power washer on the second floor, no sign of Tim anywhere. We combed the building, calling out for him, but he never replied. After an hour of walking around that wretched place, we gave up, decided Tim must have had something to do and skipped out on us. Truth be told, none of us wanted to do. to be in that place looking for him past sunset. When Tim didn't show up the next day, I should have been angry.
Starting point is 00:08:36 Instead, all I felt was this deep, gut-wrenching dread. I called his house, but no one answered. Tried three or four times, but nothing. The other guys shared some nervous jokes about it amongst themselves, lazy bugger and so on. But we knew something was wrong. I knew Tim, knew his wife. She was a full-time mother, home most of the time when she wasn't carting a kid around to school or clubs or whatever kids do. That evening, I decided to call around Tim's place on my way home.
Starting point is 00:09:10 The day you went missing, hit carpooled with one of the other guys so his wife could use the car. Their car was still right there in the driveway. I rang the bell. Nothing. Not. Shouted through the letterbox. Nothing. I walked around the side of the house, peered in through the windows, careful for nosy neighbours.
Starting point is 00:09:34 The TV was on inside the living room. Kids show, but no one watching from the sofa. I went around to the back of the house, through the gate into the garden. The hosepipe was laying in the middle of the lawn, spewing water out into the marsh that had formed around the nozzle. The back door hanging wide open. My heart stopped when I walked into the kitchen. accompanying the rising feeling of unseen eyes watching me as I entered the house there smear on the floor in thick mud
Starting point is 00:10:08 the skulls of course I called the police they arrived and questioned me I told them the same thing I've just told you they called the other guys in for questioning too got statements from the neighbours Tim and his wife's parents no one had seen or heard anything from the houses
Starting point is 00:10:30 since the day Tim disappeared. It was like they'd evaporated. Things started to unravel pretty quickly after Tim and his family vanished. Four of my guys quit that week, one after the other. They said other jobs had come up. They wanted to spend more time with their families or whatever. I know the truth. I could see it on their faces.
Starting point is 00:10:55 They were scared. After a while, it was just me and big Greg on the jobs. No one else wanted to work for me. Even tried to call in favours from some of my other friends in similar jobs. But everyone had an excuse. Word travels fast. Superstition faster. I guess looking back, I should have listened to the signs and called it a day in the business.
Starting point is 00:11:21 Refused to go into those buildings or send anyone else into them. But her contract is a contract. I've got bills to pay, a mortgage, my pension. so I don't have to clean junkie crap off the walls until I'm 80. It was my responsibility to call it quits. So, I don't care what anyone says. It was my fault. What happened to Greg?
Starting point is 00:11:48 We were going through one of the old buildings just outside the city centre. It had been bought by a bank, which, for legal reasons, will remain nameless. Greg and I had to go room by room alone, it just being the two of us, to go around at a pair of us. would have simply taken too long. Time is money. And anyway, it hadn't seen so much as a passed-out cracket for months. We didn't even bother with a stab vest at that point.
Starting point is 00:12:15 This place must have been used as some kind of commune. In the lobby alone, I counted 37 sleeping mats, poor, in pretty good condition. Also, reserves of food and drink stacked up to one side, enough for a small army. Whoever had settled here had enough know-how to get past the C.C. TV outside, cut their way inside and disable the alarm. How they had managed to do all that and then move a small community into the place, I still
Starting point is 00:12:42 have no idea. It was near the end of the day. We'd removed most of the stuff, thrown it into the skip I'd rented. I was taken care of the main lobby. Greg was in the back clearing out the bathroom. There was something about this building. It felt dark. I don't mean like no light.
Starting point is 00:13:01 It felt like a pit, a void. It was almost as if the building was right on the verge of speaking, like a screen was held in the halls ready to be released at any moment. The place pulsed. You could almost hear it. Almost. I finished up my job as quickly as possible, called for Greg. No answer.
Starting point is 00:13:26 I remember standing there, just listening to nothingness. I called out again Nothing I could have cried I mean I could literally feel myself welling up as I started walking towards the bathroom By the time I reached the door There was a lump in my throat
Starting point is 00:13:45 I hadn't felt since I was eight years old Lost and alone at a theme park I pushed the door open There in the corner of the bathroom Huddled up in a ball Was Greg All I could make out at first, apart from his bulk, his eyes, wild, pinned open.
Starting point is 00:14:07 His jaw was working around, but no sound was coming out. I stopped at the door. I wanted to go in and help him, but I couldn't force my feet to take me inside. It was as though every instinct of my body was preventing me from going inside. He looked at me, eyes pleading and terrified, the most awful expression of anguish I've ever seen. I backed up, told him I was going to go and get help.
Starting point is 00:14:36 I barely even noticed, but I was just saying sorry, over and over again, before I realized I was out the door on the street. The fresh air hit me, and I came to my senses. I sprinted back to the building, through the lobby, up to the bathroom door, threw it open. Greg was gone. one by one I swung open the cubicle doors sure enough etched into the wall of the furthest cubicle
Starting point is 00:15:06 the skulls screaming at me the police listened to my story under raised eyebrows it wasn't that they didn't believe me just that it didn't explain anything they searched the building photograph the bathroom including the skulls told me they would contact Greg's family
Starting point is 00:15:27 and let me know when he turned up He never did. Greg had a wife and two kids. The police found his youngest alone at home. Poor kid had already tucked herself into bed when the police arrived. As far as I know, she's in foster care now. After Greg, I put in a call to my contract holders. No amount of money could make me send anyone into one of those buildings again.
Starting point is 00:15:56 I was passed around to legal teams, dodged and ducked like. the plague. It was like they wanted nothing to do with me, not even to hear out what I had to tell them. Eventually, I got through to someone. He sounded high up. I didn't get his name. Not sure it would end well for me if I wrote his name down anyway. After all the threats of libel and civil suits from the legal teams, it was refreshing to speak to someone who sounded calm and non-condescending. He asked me about what happened, listened as I told him everything. After I'd spill my guts, he asked me about the state of the buildings. I was confused at first.
Starting point is 00:16:38 He asked if they were fit for purpose. I told him they were. He thanked me for my service and told me to expect a generous severance package. He rang off with a warning. I was not to mention the names or locations of any of the buildings my team in I had worked on over the past six months to anyone. If I failed to abide by this, defamation and libel would be the least of my concerns. He asked if I understood, and I told him I did.
Starting point is 00:17:10 My check came in the mail two days later. Generous really fails to do justice to describe the amount. Enough to pay the guys who quitter me the rest of their contracts. Least I could do. Enough to pay off my mortgage too, and then some. It wasn't just the money that kept me quiet all this time. I realize I've been terrified since those schools first showed up, just waiting for something awful to happen, some kind of catastrophe.
Starting point is 00:17:42 But it just hasn't come. Life has gone on. People have forgotten. Tim and Greg and the families are still missing. The cases have gone cold. I guess I just didn't want to bring it down to myself by acknowledging it. whatever it is. At this point,
Starting point is 00:18:03 I just want answers. I want to know what took my men, what those schools were, and who created them, how it's all connected. I can't find anything on the internet about the symbol. No one seems to know anything about it. I've drawn crude sketches,
Starting point is 00:18:19 even contacted the police about their photos of the symbols. But they say those records are locked. They won't tell me any more than that. Over the last few months, some of my ex-employers have begun using the buildings again. As far as I can tell, nothing out of the ordinary has happened. No more missing people or skulls. From what I've heard, business is better than ever in those places, thriving even. I'm not sure if that means anything.
Starting point is 00:18:52 I'm not sure of much these days.

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