Creepy - Along The Water
Episode Date: August 12, 2021Violence begat violence***Written by Iescapedfromalab and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer***Content warnings: Mental illness, references of suicide, child abuse.***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/c...reepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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This is the bloody disgusting podcast network.
No.
This is creepy.
A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastors and urban legends in the world.
Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide.
These stories make incredible.
graphic depictions of violence and explicit language.
Listener discretion is advised.
Creepy presents
Along the Water
Written by I escaped from a lab
and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer.
And remember, the best firefighter is never angry.
Jerry, a tall mammoth-like bald man told the
crowd, signaling us to put away our brown folding chairs and clean up the now very stale coffee and
donuts. The saying was from Dao-Dijing and didn't make much sense to me, but I was used to that.
After six years of anger management, the best thing I learned was that it was the effort to try
and connect those fluffy sayings to real life is what counted. I have a lot of the same. I have a
severe type B personality disorder.
According to doctors, it was probably genetic, as my father acted the same way.
And a thorough investigation revealed that parts of my brain were not well formed,
causing decreased activity from my prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobe.
If you've ever heard of Phineas Gage, you probably know what that does.
Except unlike Mr. Gage, I was never going to.
to get any better. I have very little impulse control. Get angry and stay that way over nothing,
and often just act like an ass even though I know better. I lie pathologically, usually without any goal.
And situations where getting caught is absolutely inevitable. My behavior rarely makes sense,
even to me. Long story short is that I do.
don't have a lot of friends sticking with me.
I walked out of the meeting, which took place in a side office in my local Salvation Army,
to my beaten-to-shit town car.
I went home to my tiny, shitty apartment, which was actually half of a living room with a paper-thin
dividing wall, and sat on my bed for a few hours.
Doing push-ups was an option, or were playing New Vegas for the 50th run just to waste
time. But ultimately I was left with nothing to think about except the many times I'd lost my
temper in the past. And that's what I did. Eventually I went to sleep, thanks to my nightly dose of
deaf and hydramine. My nightmares were horrifying that night, much worse than normal. I knew I was
dreaming, but it didn't help. One of the issues with personality disorders is that the memory
that most people turn to for strength end up working against you.
Your happiest moments of places where you should have developed as a human being,
people you could have embraced his friends, will be stained with memories of aberrant behavior you couldn't control or explain.
The faces you cherished will turn bleak at the sight of you, and you have no one.
one left to blame but yourself.
And my most common nightmare was a tour of those faces.
I've had the dream too many times.
Except this time, it was different.
Instead of ending with them all staring at me, disappointed, angry.
It ended in a place that I thought was so beautiful it made my heart flutter.
And the girlfriend who had no choice but to run like hell, Mandy,
In the end, I remember seeing Max's face, still puffy from crying, just like the last time I'd seen her.
But I didn't need to.
It was her.
I knew it even in the dream, that there was something real about it.
This wasn't just my normal nightmare.
The smell of the flowers.
Her smell.
It was the same place I had looked.
last seen her, a park in Irvine, California. I'm sorry, Steve. It's almost time, she said sadly.
She looked into my eyes briefly. Her gray eyes welled up with tears, before turning away to stare at
the University Garden that I hadn't seen in much more than ten years. That was what people did
when they still loved you, but couldn't bear the sight of you.
I'd treated her like shit, even threatened to hit her once while drunk.
That might not sound much like compared to your average wife beat her,
and I worked with guys much worse.
That doesn't matter, though.
I couldn't reconcile who I wanted to be with what I had done.
It made it almost physically painful to see her again, smell her again.
She gently placed something on the park bench next to me and stood up, walking away.
It was a gun, and I knew there was only one bullet inside of it.
It was for me.
I woke up covered in sweat, my heart pounding.
I had remembered every part of the dream.
Because it wasn't a dream.
The scent of her clean laundry and the flowers that were blooming somewhere in California
were still in my nose when I looked around my shitty apartment in Lake Worth, Florida.
Not just an imagination.
It was the organic body spray.
She spritzed.
Very distinctive.
I hated it at first.
but came to be comforted by it, the smell of the trees of California, feeling of the dry, sweet air.
This dream turned it all into a nightmare. The suggestion of suicide was horrifying to me.
Despite everything I had been through, I couldn't fathom giving up after everything I had done and try to become a better person.
The meetings.
the medications, and the friendless nights spent reading about mindfulness.
I may have been a shithead, but I had done everything I could to change that.
I didn't want my story to end that way.
But with my impulsive behavior and powerful mood swings,
there was a non-zero chance as something could push me to that fate in a moment of weakness.
What was what Mandy wanted?
It took some time for my senses to catch back up with my shitty apartment, where the smell was
acrid with moldy wood and overused cheap cleaning supplies, and air thick with humidity.
I tried to tell myself that it was a dream, but that's fucking impossible.
It just wasn't.
I tried to shake it off and go back to sleep, but I just couldn't.
I went to the gym around 3.30 in the morning when it was dead empty.
I was in the middle of some dumbbell lifts when I saw him behind me in the mirror.
My old teacher, Dr. Wright, sweater vest and all.
He had bent over backwards to help me keep it together.
I would never forget the look on his face when I was suspended from school after some kids got tired of my mood swings
and presented a list of reasons that I should be kicked out of the university.
It seemed like about half of it was absolute bullshit, but I didn't put up much of a fight anyways.
The blunt end was that everyone was sick of being around me because I'm toxic and crazy and I couldn't blame them.
That was when I started trying to get treatment and realized its futility.
And now he was right behind me in a cheap gym in the middle of the ghetto.
The old man looked just as I remembered him when I last saw him, the same disappointed stressed look on his face.
I looked around and rubbed my eyes.
He was still there.
I waved to him, but he didn't wait back.
I even tried to finish the set, but he was still there, all right.
No one else.
I could have put my fucking hand on him.
He was so real.
Was this the same thing I had seen in the dream with Mandy?
I finally gave up trying to unsee him.
I walked up to the old man, and he saw him.
smelled like his office, filled with bizarre foreign knick-knacks from different countries where he'd been
a teacher. He looked into my eyes steadily. I could count the hairs on his beard. Before I could say
anything, he cleared his voice like he always did before class. It's almost time, Steve. His tone
was solid, almost stern, as if his patience had run thin.
Then he was gone.
He didn't walk out.
There wasn't a blank or a flash of smoke.
One moment I was about to ask how he was doing and the next he wasn't there.
I fled the gym, the lone attendant looking up with confusion at my haste.
I began to break down in my car, feeling my pulse get out of control.
My mind reeling, unable to process the information.
of the situation, which was exactly what something wanted.
It occurred to me that whatever was doing this wanted me to be off guard.
Was it a ghost?
Could I add haunted to my list of problems?
I used my phone to do a Google search, and Dr. Wright was currently teaching biblical studies
courses to future missionaries in Africa.
He was nowhere near Lake Worth.
Another search, and Mandy was still alive and kicking, too.
I tried to tell myself it was a hallucination, but I'm more than familiar with every hallucinogen known to man.
Thanks to the pop culture belief that they somehow cure various mental illnesses.
Not mine, though.
It had nothing in common with any of them.
I didn't feel weak in the arms and my heart rate wasn't out of control.
The common symptoms of serotonin sickness, often a part of the neural cascade that led to who,
hallucinations. A small part of me whispered that she had every right to be angry. Maybe it was
almost time for revenge. I spit out of the parking lot, as if I could get away from whatever the
fuck had caused Dr. Wright to appear. There was nowhere I could go that would make me feel like a human
being. No one that I could talk to made me feel better. Society was a fortress built to protect
others for myself.
And knowing that changed everything about how the world looked.
There would never be a place for me.
I drove around with no goal for a bit and then returned home.
I took a shower and went to shave for the first time in five days.
As the razor cleaned up my face, making me look slightly more human, I saw someone behind me
in the still foggy portion of the mirror.
A smell of weed and French fries filled my bathroom.
I spun around there and there he was, no more than a foot away from me,
looking me dead in the eyes.
Edgar Rivera, who had been my friend for years,
and helped me go to my first meetings after I realized I was insane.
Until he couldn't just take my random mood swings and impulsive behavior any longer.
It's almost time, Steve.
What the fuck did that mean?
Almost time for what?
My heart began pounding.
The irritated final tone in his voice was exactly the same as the one I heard when he called and asked me not to call him or stop by his place again.
It was after an uncontrolled mood swing that I didn't just stop for days.
Did a part of him want revenge?
Was that what they were after?
Please, I heard myself beg.
But there was no response.
He was gone, just like Dr. Wright, because he wasn't there, and he would never be again in normal life.
This wasn't him.
Something wanted me to die.
I couldn't guess whether the newfound apparations were real or not.
But I didn't want to find out what they wanted or what it was almost time for.
My heart was pounding so fast I could see my jugular vein pump in the mirror.
It took a brief moment to think of that place.
Perhaps I could run to.
But fleeing these spectres was the only possibility that sounded absurd at that point.
I used my shitty electric razor to finish the juxt.
quickly and staggered out of the bathroom. Exhausted and weeping from self-hatred. I called in sick
from work, which didn't matter to my foreman as I was just of one of several hundred roughwork plumbers
on a commercial project. The fear, panic, and stress of seeing these figures from my past
was pushing me over an edge I had never crossed. And the stress was making it difficult to think
straight. I had to focus. I find a way to get rid of this before time ran out. Then I tried to use
Google to figure out my shit as best I could. I looked into astral projection, which seemed like an
option, but I couldn't imagine why they'd all come in me at once. I googled hallucinations and
smells, since each appearance seemed to come with its own distinct aromas. Apparently, the sense of
smell bypasses certain parts of the brain and stimulates memory directly, which while interesting
did nothing to solve the mystery of the people from my past. Schizophrenia typically makes
itself know much earlier. And my previous MMPI's Minnesota multi-phase personality inventory,
the most used gauge psychiatric condition like mine that hasn't been updated since 1989,
showed not the slightest sign of any mental illness that could degrade into hallucinations.
More importantly, I somehow knew they weren't hallucinations.
Something was forcing me to see them, hear them, remember them, even smell them.
None of it made any sense.
Why would they show up now anyways?
What was it time for?
What were these things trying to do to me?
The night turned into morning all too quickly.
In my distress, I had forgotten that I needed to avoid free time.
I don't hands are the devil's playground for a normal person.
And for myself, it could be a ticket to emotional thinking and more unavoidable impulses.
Unable to sleep even with Mets, I began pacing rapidly.
Eventually, I decided to go for a drive because that at least keeps me focused.
Palm Beach Island was the original focus of the existence of my county,
with the other 90% of land simply being labeled West Palm Beach.
An afterthought for a tiny group of extremely wealthy people.
I tried to avoid these places that I used to haunt,
but they're beautiful,
and I eventually found myself surrounded by antique.
castles, driving down the main road of the island. I used to take drives down that road all the time
before I knew I was nuts when I could dream about eventually being a homeowner in such a
lovely place. The contrast between the beautiful European-looking village and the interior
of my mind was stunning. On one hand, it was like landing on an alien planet. On the other, a small
part of me still had things in common with its inhabitants and memories of going to the
four arts society and reveling in the experience of sharing the emotional impressions of a beautiful
painting, reading books that had opened up an entirely new world to me, her trip to art
basil and Miami with some classmates who at the time were only slightly unnerved by my presence.
My aspirations for who I once desperately wanted to become clashed violently with the memories of who I had turned into and quietly lost.
As they always did, the bright orange glow of anger, resentment, and fear gradually dimmed into acceptance and self-loathing, as it always did.
I was about to turn off the road and go home.
Then I heard her.
It's almost time.
I heard that voice from behind me, but I couldn't bear to look.
This time I didn't need to see the apparations to know who it was.
It was my mother's voice, and she had been dead for several years.
The car was filled with the smell of food,
which she always made an absurd amount whenever she knew I was coming home.
I had to know if it was her,
or at least her ghost.
I wanted to check more thoroughly to see if it really was her,
if I could touch her,
but I couldn't even bring myself to turn around.
Instead, I just heard myself croak.
I'm so sorry, Mom.
She wasn't there at that point anyways.
I felt myself break on the inside.
I couldn't even conjure up a response to her voice.
My emotions flooded me with a force of a damn break.
She had done everything she could to help me become a sane, reasonable person.
She had always accepted me back, no matter how horrible my actions or mood swings.
She loved me until the end, no matter what.
I had pulled over near a golf course and began to weep hysterically.
After only a moment, a police officer knocked on the window, and with an angry face pointed to the road I had turned off from.
A single old man stood on the hill of the golf course, his hands sternly crossed over his flabby chest, staring at me triumphantly.
I nodded and resumed driving.
headed to the small isolated beach facing the intercostal waterway
that I used to enjoy reading at when I was younger.
He was bordered by two massive mansions and had no signs,
so most people didn't realize it was actually a public park.
Most of the time, the two mansions just seemed to use it as a private backyard,
with a giant yacht from one of the neighboring mansions taking out most of the view.
It was empty as always.
but it just didn't feel right.
So I left.
I went home and looked through my Facebook to see if there was anyone who might be able to lift my spirits,
only to find that a guy I had been friends with for years had died from COVID.
None of my messages had been returned by anyone else in years.
I felt bad for him.
But the loneliness served me right, I suppose.
I tried to focus, tried to look into getting additional psych help.
Thought about bumming some of my neighbors held all.
But part of me knew that wouldn't help because the problem at this point was pretty unlikely to just be in my head.
I looked into curses and hexes, but couldn't find anything like what I was experiencing.
Either a pretty big group of people had learned asked or projection or something out there was something out there was trying.
to take their shape, convince me to commit suicide, or maybe he was planning on taking care
of it personally.
I knew I deserved it, but I couldn't fathom the finality of it.
I ended up downing half a bottle of NyQuil around 1.30 in the afternoon.
I passed out gritting my teeth, waiting for the blanket of nothingness to finally come
over me. When I woke, it was dark, but I knew someone was in my bedroom with me.
Mandy's smell assaulted my memory with brutal efficiency.
She was the closest I would ever come to really loving a person.
I heard her walk up to me. Felt her sit down on the bed. There was no mistaking any of this.
There was no hallucination.
It's time now, Steve.
It's time, she said.
Her voice cracking slightly.
It was Mandy again, all right.
I heard her stand up, and I felt her place something on my bed.
I didn't need to know.
I didn't need the light to know what it was.
I waited for a moment or two,
or for whatever the apparition was,
to be gone before moving and taking the thing.
There was nothing left to say anyways.
It was cold, very heavy.
A grip was wood.
I hadn't owned a gun in more than a decade.
I had refused it since I had no emotional control.
Even though my shitty apartment had been broken into three times.
So that was what they wanted.
I got dressed in the best clothes I had, shaved a bit.
To clean up what my electric razor
had left behind.
I took a look at the gun and marveled at it.
A massive weapon.
Nesson W. 500 with a single 50 caliber round.
It was ridiculous, almost childish.
What my old gun safety instructor called an overcompensator,
as it could probably bring down an aircraft.
More importantly, it clearly belonged to someone rich,
with a golden-gray barrel with the letters J.W.
H on the side and a beautiful tree on the grip.
Ghosts are weird, I muttered to myself.
What a comically overpowered weapon.
Were they trying to make a point?
I had to wonder where it came from
and why the spirits of my past wanted not only to kill me,
but apparently send my brains into outer space.
I got into my car.
heading back to the beach that I used to love.
It was silent and still there.
I got out of my car and went to the beach along the water,
where I used to dream about going to grad school and becoming a lawyer,
a successful member of society.
I was so close to that for a moment.
I took a few moments to enjoy the beautiful architecture of the mansion with the yacht,
a mix of Spanish mission style and art deco.
The boat was similarly stunning.
A modern yacht built with tons of woodwork to make it look hyper-advanced cutty ship,
but without the sails.
A man after my own heart, I said to myself, smiling bitterly.
I began to weep as I pressed the barrel to my head.
I turned off the safety and cocked the weapon,
preparing to feel nothing at all.
I turned off the safety and chambered the round, preparing to feel nothing at all.
When suddenly, I heard something.
At first it was just someone's voice.
Indistinct.
Help me. Someone ple-
A woman's voice rang out before being silenced halfway through the word, please.
I heard something crap.
and break on the yacht.
I moved the gun away from my head and began running towards the yacht,
keeping the gun away from me in case it went off prematurely.
I made it down to the dock in record time,
jumping on the massive wood-lined boat.
A thick wooden door with tons of embellishments,
leading to the interior was locked.
But through the glass I could see a fat, ham-faced man straddling.
someone, bringing his fists down over and over on whoever had pissed him off. Blood spattering the
walls, his white polo shirt, I kicked open, finally getting it off its hinges, causing the fat
man to stop beating. Get out of here. You stay out of this, he drunkenly slurred, pointing a bloody
finger at me before preparing to bring it down again. I pointed out of it. I pointed out of this. He'd drunkenly slurred, pointing a bloody finger at me
me before preparing to bring it down again.
I pointed the weapon at his center torso and pulled the trigger, causing me instantly to go deaf,
and the fat man to go flying backward directly into a wall.
The weapon jumped out of my hand, I was grateful there was only a single bullet.
Both my arms began to ache an agony from the absurd recoil as I ran to check on whoever
had been getting their ass kicked.
It was a small, blonde girl.
wearing a skimpy and provocative dress.
She looked like a child except for her body, draped in revealing clothing.
It was easy to see that she would normally be a lot more beautiful,
despite the fact that her face was entirely swollen and hideously out of shape,
black, blue, and red.
She had lost consciousness, and I called 911 and explained one I had.
had seen. She came to within about ten minutes before the paramedics even got there, but I told her
stay still in case she had neck injury. Strong girl. The cops put me in cuffs, but never even
took me away. Apparently the girl Julia had been hired by the man from her popular Instagram profile
to model on his boat. But when she got there, he didn't just want pictures.
I overheard that the man's name was John Winston Heston,
initials on the side of the gun, and quickly put two and two together.
I told the cops I had grabbed it from the exterior of the boat on my way in,
and they seemed to believe me.
They told me not to leave town without letting them know ahead of time,
but said that my story had been checked out,
that they were only going to briefly detain me.
About 24 hours from that point,
They let me go.
One of the officers had told me that the girl was stable in the hospital,
but that the damage was pretty bad.
Mr. Hasten had been connected with two other girls who were both missing,
but his attorneys were able to get him out of trouble easily.
A few weeks later, it seemed that his family was hoping the entire incident would stay quiet.
Instead of being sued for wrongful debt,
they offered me a settlement to never say anything.
I accept it, despite an officer telling me that there is probably room to sue his estate for emotional distress of being forced to kill the guy.
Julia, it turned out, did not have the same line of thinking and sued the absolute shit out of the estate,
ignoring even the most generous, said one offer.
I couldn't blame her.
It's been eight months since then.
She got a bigger payday than Mr. Hastings' descendants we're going to get.
and she sent me a message on Facebook thanking me and wishing me well.
It felt good.
I'm using the settlement money to go back to college now for psychology.
If nothing else, it might help me understand myself better.
I was upgraded to four-minute work and given a lot of extra training.
I started training my first batch of new hires on Monday.
and probably won't be easy since I decided
to help guys with behavioral issues by giving them jobs.
I never saw another Specter again,
and that's worth all the effort in the world.
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