CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "Why I Now Live in Arizona" Creepypasta
Episode Date: December 18, 2020CREEPYPASTA STORY►by Stolhanske: 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, rather... 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►Chenthooran: https://www.deviantart.com/chenthoora...SUGGESTED 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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The lasophobia is characterized by a primal fear of open water.
This can manifest in many ways and can be exasperated by any number of fears.
The ocean is vast after all, and last I checked, we hadn't even bothered graphing out more than 10% of them.
Meanwhile, we have wannabe philanthropists fixing to send us to Mars.
But then, I suppose, the sand is always redder somewhere.
Fear of open water is not something I would have considered a problem.
According to my mar, I was swimming like a pro by age too.
I did freestyle in high school, we got a bit more into sailing,
and, after a tour with a USS butler,
I did some work towing in salvage for the USNS.
I've seen plenty of odd stuff out on the water islands of trash
you could fairly walk across.
Dead dolphins belly up on toxic waters, as far as the eye could see,
a failed piracy attempt that saw both vessels capsized,
but none of that turned me away from the sea.
See, the logical summation is that the ocean, like any other fact of earthly nature, is as gorgeous as it is indifferent.
Respect must be given, and even then, sometimes, the ocean must take a dew.
That's why sailors work by routine as a rule, checking and double-checking every knot in every rigging,
gazing upon the waves for a change in the currents, trusting the stars over their own skewed sense,
and then, even then, they do rely on superstition.
As for me, well, I relied on two inches of steel hull.
But, although I wasn't a practicing Catholic,
I had my mother's pendant with me at all times,
a small silver disc pressed with the cameo of Mary.
So I got myself a nice stipend and settled down in New York for a while,
doing contract work and saving up for a sailing trip around the world.
And I still hate myself.
I hate the memory of my smug self as I haggled with the agent.
I was doing fine.
I could have gotten another place.
Hell, somewhere closer to the dock.
So, what's the catch?
I mean, this place is too good to be so cheap.
I folded my arms and leaned back as she averted her eyes,
sweeping her already neatly pinned hair behind her ear.
It was casual, but it was still a tell.
She sighed and met my eyes,
and I could tell she wasn't in the mood to tell me boldly.
face lies. Well, to be honest, there was a death in this unit about two years ago.
That had my brows raised, but before I could begin any belligerent questioning, she continued.
It wasn't a murder or anything like that. Someone happened to pass away in the tub.
They drowned? There have been two more tenants since, but there's far more life to the place
than sad memories. She finished a bit weakly.
That wasn't in the ad, I sighed.
She pursed the lips and looked about the place.
Honestly, it was a nice place.
The front door opened into a small foyer,
an open living area with huge windows looking onto a sizable balcony,
a full-sized kitchen,
even a nice whole linen closet like Mars House had.
Already I could see myself frying up some butted fish at the stovetop
I was struggling not to pass out on the couch an hour into something.
I made an offer.
The first night was like most in a new place.
I unpacked the essentials, ordered some pizza, crack some beers,
and watched LeBron James take a laughable dive.
I mean, the guy could fold me into a basketball and dribble me up and down the court,
but I still snorted and called him a pansy.
Playoffs brought out the best and worst in athletes.
You know how sometimes there's this beat of silence between a broadcast when they cut a commercial?
I was gazing, stupily, at the buzzing screen after the fanfare of ESPN passed,
when that delay hit, and in the quiet hum I heard it, this dripping ever so quietly.
Whether due to my frugal nature or my adherence to neatness, after several years following military protocols,
I pushed myself off the couch and looked about for the source of the noise.
Ah, I thought, heading through the broad, open door into the kitchen.
I turned the knob firmly and the dribble ceased.
I got back to dissecting the feats of better men than I.
It was a week later when it woke me.
The sky outside was that greyish tint
where you couldn't tell if it was 1 a.m. or dawn.
I slapped about on my bedside table for my phone and checked.
3.02.
God damn it.
And then I heard it.
A steady drip, drip.
I closed my eyes, even as I rolled them back in my head.
Of course I need to get a new fixture.
The place was a little too good.
and you know what, hey, on the bright side,
I needed a project to keep me busy on my off days.
I wanted to just drift back to sleep,
but for one, the way I'd woken was so sudden and complete
that I knew it would be a while to lower my heart rate,
and for another, I really needed to empty my bladder.
I yawned widely as I plodded blindly down the hall,
confident in my lack of tripping hazards,
past the linen closet towards the bathroom.
I shivered and realised my feet,
feet were as cold as if I'd left them out during a foray or past St. John's.
Of course. I sighed again and made my way to the bathroom, did my business and made sure to turn
the water fully off. I'd made my way back to bed and started the doze. And though I couldn't be
sure of it then, I can swear with some certainty now that the steady drip of water lulled me
back to sleep. So, just under two weeks into moving into the place, I was having issues with my
water and central air, and becoming generally more irritable overall.
My sleep was suffocating, though I had attributed that to being in a new place.
Something else began to nag at me, however, something unreasonable and unseemly,
something from the depths of my monkey mind, fueled by pop culture and campfire stories.
I got my laptop out and started Googling.
That lying trench, I muttered to myself, perusing the article.
It was sensationalised as hell, as would be anything printed by the post.
George Rafferty had rented this unit two years back.
Apparently, some folks were sent a check on him when he hadn't come to work for two days.
By the time they found him, he'd been dead for at least four days, since before the weekend,
though the examiner couldn't say for sure due to his waterlog state.
Obviously, this wouldn't be much of a story to end up in the post,
nor would it have elicited such a reaction from yours truly
if it weren't for a certain extra detail
that being that rafferty was found in the hallway, not the tub.
Now, I'm not saying it's impossible for someone to drown out of water.
All it takes is inhalation into the lungs after all,
but that he was found waterlogged?
I sighed and considered the source,
a little more furious digging and...
Nothing.
It's like this guy didn't exist as far as any reputable publications was concerned.
On a whim that felt a little guilty, I typed his name into the Facebook search bar.
It was a common enough name and quite a few names popped up.
But one stuck out to me.
Here was no option to contact or defend them, and there was some script on their profile picture
that reminded me of text on the cover of a paperback novel.
A pleasant face smiled back at me.
a balding man with a neat beard, the summer sun reflecting of his dark brown forehead.
1962 to 2018, the text read,
Always looking forward.
The comments were all condolences and affirmations of love from those that knew him.
The feeling of guilt intensified, and I clicked away.
So, what had I learned?
I sighed and looked around the place.
The walls didn't bleed.
I didn't see things crawling on the ceiling at night.
The idea that I was being haunted by a ghost
that made my damn forces drip
began to seem more absurd.
And, though I should have been laughing at myself,
I just felt like a kid who got caught still believing in Santa.
Poor guy, I thought.
I wondered vaguely what organised crime outfit he'd run afoul of
as I headed into the kitchen.
That night.
I dreamed about him.
George Rafferty stood at the foot of my bed,
I sat up and stared at him.
His dead, milky eyes boring into mine.
His smooth complexion had gone pale and mottled,
his flesh puffing out so he was nearly twice his size in life.
It bulged against the tattered remains of a suit and tie oddly,
like a scarecrow stuffed to excess.
And I could hear it splashing from his fingertips like a spring rain.
He opened his mouth as if to speak,
but his swollen tongue prevented him.
Instead, he just shook his head slowly.
twice, no.
There was something very sad about that one small gesture,
and before I could say anything, ask him anything,
he receded into the dark.
I woke with a start.
The sky outside was that greyest tint,
and I sighed, rubbing my eyes.
For a moment, I wondered why the dream hadn't scared the hell out of me,
but I shrugged it off and kicked myself of filling my head
with visions of drowned men before bed.
The next day, I noticed it.
I was sitting on the couch, working steadily through a Chinese food meal for five,
and watching the late, great, Alex Trebek, quiz a Midwestern school teacher on what brought her to the show.
When I heard it again.
That goddamn drip.
And I practically leapt to my feet.
Hell, I cut off the valve under the sink if I had to, just to stop that annoying.
I stepped in something cold and wet.
What the hell?
The hallway was sudden, enough water collected in the floorboards that I could feel it splash at every step.
My eyes widened with fury as I stumped over to the bathroom, expecting to find a spraying faucet.
The bathroom was silent, pristine.
The faucet didn't so much as quiver with the threat of a droplet.
What's more, the floor was dry.
I took a step back directly into the puddle.
My mind began to reel, but mainly with questions of,
What the hell? What is this? Why? How?
My eyes swept up and down the hall.
The bathroom wasn't the source of the flooding, and it sure wasn't the living room.
My eyes settled on the linen closet, and I heard a small burbling noise as a ripple of water belched out from beneath the door.
My heart began to pound, but, filled with the need to make sense of the nonsensical,
I leaned forward and gripped the knob, opening wide to what I knew to be a row of shelves
and a stark metal bar running across the top of the closet.
What I faced instead was...
Darkness.
Chilly air billowed past me, causing my teeth to chatter involuntarily, cutting right through my woolen sweater.
I took the sleeves down over my forearms and got out the flashlight function on my phone.
It was a staircase, winding down, cut.
from some kind of dark, blue-grained stone.
It was impossible for me to see around the curve of the flight
to the bottom with this hillygal design,
but suddenly I very much wanted to.
Something tried to hold me back.
Again, that small voice in the back of my head,
the sailor's intuition, the prayers of my mar.
But stupidly, foolishly, I stepped forward.
I felt the darkness enveloped me,
and immediately turned back.
The rectangle of light that was my apartment glowed pleadingly,
the guys having far too much fun drinking terrible light beer,
cajoling me back to the television.
Instead, I turned and squinted into the depths.
My phone's light held aloft.
I descended.
It's a funny thing what happens to your extremities in low temperatures.
Blood flow generally rushes to those areas to warn them up,
but as you get colder and colder,
their blood recedes into your body.
Paratizing your essential organs.
Everything else becomes...
Alien.
As I continued lower,
I continually wondered
why I didn't just go back
for at least some slippers
as my feet became numb
and sluggish against the cold stone.
My teeth stopped chattering,
but my teeth was nearly visible before me.
And I started to hear an odd,
familiar sound,
like the snores of my bunkmate,
or the soft rising
and falling of Mars respirator
when she was in the last days.
I forged ahead.
my head spinning with questions, clouded by anxiety, keen with delirium.
And then, around a hundred steps down, I heard it more clearly, and I knew what it was.
So familiar was the sound.
It was the sound of waves, ebbing, flowing, lapping at a rocky shore.
My confusion doubled.
Was there some kind of underground pier connected to this building?
I descended further.
150 steps, 200.
I was beginning to feel a bit tired
and was considering heading back up
to plan an actual foray
when I felt the air began to change.
The sound of the waves was all around me at this point.
I continued, and the steps led to an archway,
succinct and functional in characteristic
ancient Greek brevity of style.
I stepped through and my eyes widened.
This couldn't make sense.
Before me lay the sea, far and vast as the eye could see, just a few yards from where I stood.
A massive full moon hung in the sky, the sky, above reflecting across the churning water.
I gaped and took a step forward, looking around, trying to take stock of the place.
There didn't seem to be anything nearby, just the rocky plateau that breached the night sea.
I pinch myself
This is
I shook my head
And turned to head back up the stairs
I needed to show this to someone
Mike or Pierre
My heart stopped entirely
The doorway was gone
The stairs were gone
I was alone on a rock
Some 15 feet across
In the middle of some ocean
A particularly large wave
crashed against the rock
And I sat down very quickly
I wits at my phone and was not entirely surprised to see a complete lack of service.
The ocean, like any other fact of earthly nature, is as gorgeous as it is indifferent.
Much like a forest, by day, it dances, dappled with sunlight, populated by caviting creatures
that go about their business, if not wholly inviting, at least appreciable.
By night, nature takes a dew.
To walk around a forest at night is the attempt to death.
To be adrift at night is to experience death.
I tried to control my breathing as I looked around myself wildly,
expecting the door to appear at any moment.
It didn't.
I peered over the water, hoping to see the wink of a ship,
or hell the dark outline of land.
The black sea and the black sky met in a perfect line.
That's when I noticed that the sky was starless.
I don't know why.
it didn't click before, but something about that made me feel horrible.
It was a sign I wasn't on any seas I'd ever known.
I wanted to lie down and curl up,
but no matter how I seeded myself,
the black limbo disoriented me,
tricking me into feeling like I was capsizing.
I sat on my ass and looked up at the baleful moon
to try and send to myself.
The wild thought of leaping in and just swimming occurred to me,
and suddenly I was beset by the flash of a bloated,
somber corpse shaking his head.
No.
The waves shifted and swelled.
A massive, huge swell.
I expected it to crash over me and pull me under.
But he kept rising.
My eyes widened and then I was weeping,
weeping and whispering,
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, to myself.
I felt the truest of fear,
the fear that makes you genuinely
and deeply call for your mother.
The wave pulled itself.
free of the water, showing itself
to be a neck.
An enormous neck that writhed
over the spray, creating
maelstroms in its wake.
The mouth at the end of the blackened,
serpentine figure, opened, and let
loose a plaintive, piercing cry.
It reverberated onto the
water and into the distance, echoing
repeatedly. It also shook
the teeth in my skull and made my lungs
feel like they were going to collapse.
It had barely subsided when I
saw it. Across the water.
More massive snake-like figures were rising and wailing a return in different pitches,
but all of them discomforting to mammalian ears.
It rose in pitch to a deafening howl and the water raged, whipping up under the rock and soaking my jeans.
I clutched my knees to my chest, closed my eyes and tried not to moan too loudly.
My mother's pendant was clutched tight in one hand.
I can't say how long I sat like that.
It could have been for 30 seconds, for 30 minutes.
The noise abated, the water calmed.
I opened my eyes to a black sea flowing gently, watched by the full moon.
When I turned to check the horizon, I'd stopped myself from crying out.
The door had returned, set into the stone pillar that extended up, up, seemingly endlessly towards the sky.
I didn't care if it took me home.
I needed to be out of this place.
I crawled to it on my hands and knees, and seeing an ascending stair-carriage,
case enclosed by stone walls, I clambered to my feet, sobbing silently, casting my hands at the walls
for support as I climbed back up. The waves receded into a shore, and finally a sigh, and the air
got just a touch warmer. When my hand slapped against the flat wood of the closet door, I nearly
panicked getting it open and fell into the hallway, a shivering mess. The agent didn't know
what I was talking about, and probably thought I was insane. By the
end of it, she just told me to take it up with a property manager.
There were some words, some heated exchanges, but in the end, I leveraged the fact that they
had been less than honest about the possible homicide in the unit, and we managed to come to
an agreeable understanding.
I was able to get out of my lease of reduced cost, and they didn't have to deal with fringed
weirdos and the post skulking around the building and driving prices down.
I decided to move somewhere where the creatures that conjure ideas of world-eating snakes
and lock-dwelling monsters couldn't intrude.
Before she passed,
Ma always said the desert out here
was a favourite place to visit,
vast and wild.
I'm glad I was able to give her ashes
the kind of send-off they deserved.
And yeah, maybe there's something out here too,
some cryptid that run screaming across the land,
bleeding livestock for fun and feed.
But you know what?
I'll take my chances,
with my two feet on the ground,
and Mother Mary hear my part.
pocket. A word of hopefully redundant advice? If you happen to hear your forces dripping,
don't go down those stairs.
