Creepy - Ashley, My Love & My wife has been acting strange ever since I had my MRI

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Ashley, My Love***Written by: No One of Consequence and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt ***Content Warning: Mentions of animal abuse***My wife has been acting strange ever since I had my MRI***Written by: Jamie Polizzi and Narrated by: Jimmy Ferrer***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by Alex Aldea 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.

Welcome to the bloody disgusting network. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of biopictions. Silence and explicit language.

Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents. Ashley, my love. Written by known of consequence and narrated by Cole Burkart. Ashley Dillon is the love of my life. I say is and not was because she's not dead. Not yet. Currently, she exists in suspended animation.

For as long as she's inside the containment field, she'll never die. In human years, she's 12, but in dog years, she's reached her 80s. However, her soul is as youthful as the day she came into my life. I was a 16-year-old bookworm with an aptitude for science and theoretical physics. Space exploration was a fascinating hobby, and my nerd status didn't afford me any friends. I was a lonely student, and my parents took me to the Animal Defense League so I could have a companion. The idea of a pet seemed dumb to my sullen teenage mind. I wandered the grounds with arms crossed and a sour expression.

I thought dogs were loud, obnoxious creatures requiring too much maintenance, and would distract. me from my studies. I felt much the same way of friends, for that matter. A few times I tried to ask girls at school out, but they only laughed at me. After the third time, I resigned myself and embraced the loneliness I usually denied feeling. Who needs human companionship anyways? The constant barking of hundreds of dogs was starting to get to me, and I zoned out in the middle of the facility's dog park. With my eyes closed, I concentrated on my breathing to drown out the chaos around me. This worked too well. I didn't notice a pair of female staff members working with a large dog nearby. Taking deep breaths, I certainly didn't pay attention when the dog broke away from them.

I was taken by surprise, but managed to keep my footing when a pair of paws planted themselves onto my chest. I looked into the most beautiful, soulful, chocolate-brown eyes I have ever seen. For what seemed like a long time, I dazed into eyes that were surrounded by beautiful, shiny black fur. I was completely spellbound. Eventually, noise from our surroundings came to the forefront of my perception, and I began to pay attention, but never broke eye contact. The ladies came over to us and urged me not to move. apparently this dog has a serious dislike of males and tries to bite any that come close. Looking into those eyes, I knew she wouldn't ever hurt me.

As if to prove it, she leaned into me and licked my face. Moving closer to me, those paws rested on my shoulders, and she nuzzled her head under my chin. We belong together now, I told them, as I wrapped my arms around her, giving the first hug I ever wanted to give anyone. At that moment, she became not just my family, but my world. We walked around the grounds with the ladies for 30 minutes. They gave me Ashley's background, and it made me want to cry. Her previous owners were an abusive family consisting of a drunk father and two asshole boys. Barely a year old, she was brought to the facility malnourished with a broken leg and a big gash on her flank. The injuries weren't caused by an accident, but physical abuse

by that wretched family. I demanded to know who they were, and my intentions were to cause them severe harm. Legally, they couldn't divulge that information, even if they had it. What little they did tell me was enough to track them down. The father was arrested for drug distribution. the boys were sent to live with their uncle. Ashley was taken to the league after the DEA drug raid that resulted in the father's incarceration. Word was those boys were behind the abuse. This doesn't matter to me. He allowed such horrible treatment to occur, and I wanted him to suffer for it.

My parents had expected me to pick a small breed of dog, not a Labrador retriever. They made me painfully aware that a dog like this was going to require a lot of cleaning up after, and she was my responsibility. Bringing Ashley home wasn't a choice. It was destiny. The ladies were a little concerned that she would try to bite my father, but she acted as if he wasn't there and stayed by my side. As soon as we got home, we went to my room,

and while she explored her new surroundings, I researched her breed. I wanted to take the utmost hair of her, making sure not to neglect any of her needs. We played in the backyard for at least an hour every day, save for bad weather days. I had been warned that Ashley didn't do too well with thunder, but as long as I was around, she was unfazed. In the morning before school, I took her on a two-mile walk and let her get to know the neighborhood, not the people, but the geography, in case she ever got out, and and would need to find her way back to me. I got her a new collar, but made some alterations.

It was black nylon with plastic clips, but my girl deserves something special. I replaced the clips with a black, matte metal, and hands sewed a grid pattern with the thickest royal blue thread I could get my hands on. The pattern was very important, because I made it to match a ring I went out and bought for myself. 8mm black stainless steel decorated with blue accents set inside a band with a clear coat protective finish.

The lady at the jewelers was a little perplexed that a teenage boy was buying a man's wedding band, but I didn't tell her anything. I don't think she would have understood, especially since I immediately put it on my left ring finger. If my parents noticed the ring and its similarity to Ashley's collar, they never said anything. I think they were just happy with the changes in me. Thanks to all the playing and our early morning watch, my body went from a thin science nerd to an athletic track star. Being of my junior year, I tried out for track and outdid their best runners. Before long, I went from a nobody to a somebody. but it changed very little in my life.

Even though fellow students knew who I was, I stayed a science nerd and didn't have friends. It wasn't because the other students weren't interested in me. I had no intentions of getting to know them. When I wasn't in school, I was home with Ashley. She waited at the front window until I got home every day. Once inside, I dropped my backpack and took her to the backyard for playtime. After dinner, we'd go to my room, and I'd work on homework while she'd trawled up next to me.

Sometimes she'd rest her head in my lap. Whenever together, we were always touching. At night, she slept in my bed, and I'd either spoon her or she'd rest her head on my chest. Don't get the wrong idea. There wasn't a sick, sexual component to our relationship. It was companionship and pure love. The rain did generate a lot of questions at school with outrageous rumors, but I ignored them. No one needed to know my business, and even if I told someone, they'd just take it the wrong way.

By the time I was in my second semester of my senior year, there was a lot of buzz around the school about me. I would overhear girls saying how hot I was, which I found surprising. Looking in the mirror, all I saw was me, and I didn't think. think it was anything special. My muscle was well-defined, and I could see the pattern of my abs through my t-shirt. That was just a result of all the time I spent playing with Ashley. I could have easily gotten her girlfriend if I wanted one, but I had everything I needed waiting for me at home. As it was, I felt guilty not spending more time with Ashley. Eliza Devine, voted the hottest girl in school, started dropping hints that she wanted me to ask her

to prom when it was weechs away. I had plans to watch prom-based horror movies with Ashley that night, so I feigned ignorance of what she was getting at, and simply said I wasn't planning to go. I was the number one trash star with a full college scholarship, and I completely blew her off. My studies were doing well in college, still living at home since dorms didn't allow pets. I got to spend more time with Ashley. I was obliged to keep up with track, but my time at home was more than it had been in high school, thanks to online courses, which half of my classes were. At the second most important track meet in my first year, I ended up going head-to-head with a guy two years older than me, Josh Singer. I made it look like he was going to win the race, but halfway through,

I blew past him and kicked his ass. It took all my willpower not to literally beat the ever-living shit out of him. His name had been seared into my mind years ago. He was one of the boys that hurt my Ashley before we found each other. Destiny struck again. Titting his ass on the field wasn't enough for me. With Ashley's head resting in my lap, I used my advance, computer stills to hack that shithead's life. I ruined his credit, killed his grades, which got him

kicked off the track team, made him look like a police informant against a local drug gang, and made him appear to be a child predator. Outside of outright killing him, it was the best I could do. Feeling the soft fur on my girl's head with a gentle caress, I knew it wasn't a nice. I got to work on the rest of his family. To this day, I think a certain drug cartel is still hunting down the surviving members of that family. The father was easy to get to, and I still have the news clipping of his death on my fridge. I was working on my doctorate when I got recruited by a government research agency. They wanted me to work on a program that would be the future of deep space exploration.

A lot of work has to be done in an office with whiteboards, since it had a lot of theoretical aspects. Once the design and math were figured out, the work would move into a laboratory. But before then, I was allowed to date Ashley with me. I wasn't head of the team, but I was one of the smartest among them. Ashley became our mascot, and I was happy to see that most of the team were women, not because I was looking for a sexual relationship or anything like that, but because Ashley still didn't like other males. As time went on, we were both getting older,

but it was hitting Ashley harder than me. I was in the prime of my life, but she was slowing down. Our playtime's got shorter because she'd get tired quicker, and it was the first time I allowed myself to think of the worst. At the most, she'd lived to be 12, and the thought of not having her in my life was the most devastating thing that would ever happen to me. One of the projects my team was working on

was suspended animation. Basically, we were trying to figure out a way to put a person into stasis, causing them to sleep for years at a time and not physically age a day. The project was at least two years from testing, but that was too long. I tripled my efforts

and got us there in just shy of a year. By that time, Ashley's body was failing, and my vet was advising I have her put down. I spent my last night with Ashley at home. I fed her the best states I could afford, took her to the dog park, and laid with her in bed. As she slept the most peaceful sleep

I have ever seen her have, I gave her the necessary injections needed for the lawn sleep. Before anyone got into the lab, I placed Ashley in a hidden stasis pod in my office and started the sequence. In moments, I recreated our successes in the lab and froze my girl in time, never to age a single day, until the containment field is either turned off or unexpectedly fails. Completely crushed. I sat on a bench at our favorite dog park and cried. Ashley wasn't dead, but she wasn't in my life anymore. Not until I complete phase two.

I couldn't get enough air in my lungs. My heart rate was speeding and the world was spinning. My focus was quickly diminishing, but something prevented me from falling into the dark. The world stopped spinning, but began shaking from hands on my shoulders trying to bring me back to myself. Chocolate brown eyes just like Ashley's looked into mine with obvious concern. There wasn't black fur around those eyes, but pale skin. A woman was shaking me out of whatever kind of attack I was suffering from, asking me if I could hear her. Eventually, I responded with tears in my eyes.

I said, Ashley's taken the long sleep, and I started crying all over again. This stranger was kind enough to hold me as I wept. Once I was able to compose myself, I apologized for breaking down. She assumed that Ashley was my wife, but I told her the truth, at least as much of it as I could without revealing top-secret information. I even told her about my ring and Ashley's collar, the first person I've ever explained it to. She was surprisingly understanding. Her name is Anya, and she's a dog walker.

She recently immigrated to the U.S. from Russia, and having to go through Ukraine and eventually Canada. Anya understands the grief of losing a pet that was the best friend a person could have. When she was a girl, she had a husband. but he didn't die of old age. A military truck ran him over when she was 15, and she never got over it. As a 27-year-old immigrant, she was having a hard time finding a good job.

Since she still loves dogs, but can't bring herself to get one herself, she became a dog walker and sitter. Ashley and I used to come to this park twice a week, but I never noticed her before. Anya had seen me many times, and we even spoke, that I can recall. I see her now, and she's beautiful, black hair, those chocolate-brown eyes and a kind face. Over the next few months, we became good friends.

My work continues, but life feels empty without my girl. Anya and I get together for coffee after work most days. It's companionable, but I'm still empty. Laying in bed isn't relaxing without Ashley's presence. Instead, I lay there and continue to work. My mind, it goes over the math and issues with technology. We've been successful with creating a stable stasis field, but you can't send a spaceship hurtling through space with its crew asleep

and no one at the wheel. Artificial intelligence can only go so far, and there's a reason science fiction is full of homicidal, self-aware computer systems. Phase 2 of the Deep Space Exploration Program is to transpose a human mind into a machine. Our goal is to have several lesser AI programs operating the ship under the control of a human mind. Unfortunately, we've run into a snag. The human mind isn't hard to transpose into hardware.

The problem is storing the data sufficiently. We currently don't have hardware capable of housing something as complex as a person's mind. The brain may be a mass of swishy gray matter, but its capabilities are beyond what we can do with computers. Our current work is comprised of cloning a human brain, giving it a blank slate, and transposing a consciousness into it, hooted up with the proper electrodes, and it's feasible that a disembodied, manufactured human brain could effectively command a ship through deep space. Last night, after finally succeeding in blanking a brain and transposing someone else's consciousness into it, I explained everything to Anya.

She was mortified by how easily my team is playing God, but her reaction is, short-lived. Some doing her wasn't the easiest thing I've done, but once the drudge got in her system, it wasn't a problem. I may have been working around the clock on this project, but as soon as we transposed a mind into the blanked brain, phase two of my plan was ready. Many times over the last few months, Anya has reminded me so much of my beloved Ashley. It will take some time getting used to it for the both of us, but I think Ashley will like being in Anya's body. We'll finally be together again, and this well of depression I've been in will finally be over. If I fail, my life will be over, but I'm not the type to swallow a handful of sleeping pills.

The only question is, how many people will die with me? I'm a depressed genius with access to military technology and a vengeful heart. Just asked Josh Singer and his family. Wait, you can't. Because they're dead or on the run. If Ashley is lost to me forever, I'm going to snap and set the world on fire. What else is a mad scientist to do when they lose the only love they've ever had? Creepy presents. My wife has been acting strange ever since I had my MRI, written by Jimmy Polisi, and narrated by Jimmy Ferrer.

An on-looking man had been pounding on the plastic barrier at the check-in desk while we were waiting in the waiting room. Shouting was sounded like a string of nonsense at the poor hospital employee behind it. I was reaching that weird twilight state where the... The sedatives make everything seem slightly surreal. The pictures in the magazine I was holding seemed to be moving, and I was pointing them out to my wife, Marianne, who suppressed a laugh in response. I was a bit out of it, but I do remember he was screaming something along the lines of that he was very sick, and that something was in his body with him, and they needed to get it out. As she led me out of the waiting room, my nurse cheerfully excited.

explaining the procedure to me while wearing the brightest smiley face scrubs I'd ever seen. I shot one look back to Marie Ann, because despite the waiting room being nearly completely empty, the yelling guy had sat down right next to her and stared at her while he kept rubbing his eyes. She smiled at me. Gave me her, I'll be fine look, and waved me on, and pulled out a well-worn paperback. Once we had gotten past the door, there was a young woman in a hospital bed being taken down the same hall as me. She smiled at me serenely, but there was something weird about her that I couldn't put my finger on. Maybe the way she stared at me without blinking, or how she breathed in odd, exaggerated breaths.

It was almost as if she was trying to demonstrate to those around her that she truly wasn't authentic. living, breathing, person. She stared at me with what looked like to be curling, delicate black threads emerging from her eye sockets, but I chalked that up to the sedation meds at the time. I don't remember much about the scan itself. I'm not sure how long I had been trapped in there for, but it was late morning when I went in,

pitch black outside when I came out. I'd come too, in the dark and tight space, the gentle warring of the sounds of the machine. There were no doctors, nurses, or technicians in my room, and the lights were off. It was eerily silent. I hadn't realized where I was at first, and had squirmed in my post-sedation stupor. I instinctively tried to sit up, and my nose made hard contact with the inside of the machine. They had been kind enough to approve sedating me for the hour and half-long scan due to my claustrophobia,

but then apparently they had just forgotten about me. I had pounded on the inside of that awful white tunnel and screamed until I was hoarse, and still no one came for me. At one point I felt something tug at me, cold and clammy hands pulled in delicately at my ankles. but they must have been giving up because not long afterwards I was alone again. I would have thought the whole memory was a fabrication of my drugged mind, but there was an odd grayish residue on my ankles when I finally got out.

Thought of Marie Ann sitting in the waiting room and didn't know how everyone could have forgotten about me. Surely she would have asked about me when several hours had passed and I still hadn't returned. Eventually I calmed down enough to release the belt and slowly inch my way out, trying to keep my eyes shut and my breathing steady, while not focusing on the fact that my face was so close to the inside of the tunnel that I could feel my own breath reflected back onto my face.

I tried to ignore the friction burns as I accidentally drug bare flesh against the smooth interior in the distance, awful screaming like I, I had never heard before, seamlessly transitioned into a laughter. It was so odd that it gave me chills. It floated down the silent hall. At one point as I walked towards the elevator, I thought I saw a small and perfectly round set of eyes gleaming at me from behind the glass panel in one of the darkened rooms. I told myself it was the last of my drugs in my system, messing with my head. That was why the elevator buttons looked to be painted, was still drying with blood as they lit up. Two, I assured myself.

Just the man's. I stumbled back the way that I remember the nurse leading me, until I saw something that made me stop cold. The handprint stole the story. Sloppily written on blood, what used to be an off-white floor. Pull. Pull, drag. From following the uneven and messy tracks, I guess that someone had been hauling themselves down the hallway using their hands,

while the rest of them dragged along the dingy linoleum, leaving streaky crimson in their wake. The hallway was littered with what looked like long black hairs, seemed to be moving ever so slightly. At this point, I really... Really hoped that I was just hallucinating. It began from the path to the waiting room and then continued to the hall that forked away from me. There was so much blood.

I didn't know how the person was even able to keep getting that far. The smell itself was overwhelming. I had accidentally stepped into it and I could still feel the warm liquid as it seeped into my hospital-issued socks. Still couldn't blink both eyes in unison. Those very real feeling sensations coupled with the absolute lack of people and symphony of beeps and alerts from the rooms on either side of the narrow hall around me made it harder and harder to convince myself that I was simply drugged out of my mind. Somehow, despite all the other noise,

I could still hear the faint wet dragging sound, someone crawling through the darkness. I was a bit woozy, desperate to get out, so I called out into the distance that I was going to get help. Sounded raw, meat dragging along the linoleum pause for a few moments before resuming. I realized that it seemed to grow louder, almost as if they had changed direction, and were now heading back towards me.

In that moment I felt, dread gnawing at me, and suddenly I didn't want them to reach me. I felt that something terrible would happen if they did. After heading away from the increasingly loud, wet crawling sound in the hallway, continued my trek back towards the waiting room. My moist socks left bloody footprints in my wake. The pattern which confirmed that I was still weaving a little bit as I walked. If I were here alone,

I probably would have hauled ass out of the emergency room. As soon as I saw the blood or whatever was lurking in the darkness in the floor below. But I could see Marie-Anne's lime-green hatchback in the parking lot through a window in the hall. She was still inside. Even though the trail led from the waiting room, the person crawling through the empty hallway was not my wife. That's what I told myself. She was fine. She'd still be sitting right there where I'd seen her last.

Some of the doors to the occupied rooms were just slightly ajar. I tried to ignore the sounds coming from within them. I finally came across the nurse's station that I had remembered being the last thing between myself and the secured doors. But when I saw there quickly killed any relief that had been forming, There were feet sticking out from just behind the counter. They moved and twitched irregularly. Despite my better judgment, I stepped over the mess of gore in the hallway to take a closer look.

The legs seemed to dance to an unearthly melody that only their owner could hear. I saw my nurse. The one who had taken me back for the scan. I was so out of it before that I had forgotten her name, but not her smile that matched her smiley faces on her trippy neon scrubs. That smile was long gone now. There was still a jagged bit of ribs and torso left above the hip and both legs. But the rest of her?

Just missing. I stared in horror. It took me a moment for my eyes to adjust, and to see that the macabre dance was just a result of something moving around just inside the gaping wound of what was left of her torso. I could see many of the now-familiar delicate hair-like threads spilling out of her body. They moved in unison, and it almost looked as if the small tendrils were beginning to reform the parts of her body that were missing. It was like watching an otherworldly 3D printer for flesh and bone. I clamped a hand over my mouth tightly to keep quiet and took a last, long, sad look at her blood-soaked scrubs and flailing legs.

I sped up and continued onward clumsily. Despite what I told myself, I almost couldn't believe it when I found Marie-Anne still sitting on a now-sticky and saturated chair in the waiting-roar. her sweater was slashed in pieces and stained. An entire arm of it was missing. Splatters and small droplets freckled her cheeks. The cover of the book she was now holding upside down. But she looked entirely uninjured.

At a fleeting moment where I wondered where the blood around her had come from. But I was more relieved than anything else. The room was in disarranted. A single sneaker with the foot still in peaked out from under her chair. But she didn't seem even remotely phased by the carnage around her. She stared at me for a moment. Almost as if she had to flip through mental flashcards before she recognized me. But I figured it was due to whatever horrible things she had recently bore witness to.

On our way out, I heard tapping behind the plastic panel at the check-in desk. made the mistake of looking and saw the young hospital employee from before, gripping the desk, desperately trying to stay upright. His face, which was devoid of any emotion, looked misshapen, as if someone had tried to put together a human face, having never seen one before. Those thin, black tendril-like threads emerged from his eyes. The cavernous gap, where his lower jaw. should have been.

They were weaving together and seamlessly blending into his skin before my eyes, repairing what likely should have been lethal injuries. We were so close to the exit when I heard the double doors move and ducked behind some chairs. I tried to pull Marie-Anne down with me, but she stood firm. Shoes in the tattered, stained hems of the brightly covered smiley-faced scrubs came into my view from where it was hidden. It seemed as if my poor nurse had simply got up and strolled away, unperturbed by the minor inconvenience that was the entire top third of her body being missing.

My wife stared but didn't react at all to whatever she was witnessing. Eventually what remained of my nurse walked out the front doors, disappeared into the darkness beyond the lights of the parking lot. We eventually made it to our car, but I can't drive yet. She's just sitting in the driver's seat staring at me without blinking. Still and quiet except for an occasional loud and irregular breath. I swear, I see delicate threads spilling from under her eyes. I called 911 but keep getting the dispatchers in the next county over.

They keep routing me back to my own county, but no one is answering. I missed the moment when I thought waking up stuck. after a full body MRI was going to be the worst part of my day. My wife has been acting so weird since my MRI. We're still sitting here. I'm tired, confused, and have the worst itch forming behind my eyes. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration,

please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at CreepyPod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons Share-A-Lite licensing or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.