Creepy - Candy - Testimony Of The Accused & Black Plastic Bags

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Candy - Testimony Of The Accused***Written By: Atfil and Narrated By: Alicia Atkins***Content Warning: Dangerous Weight Loss Methods, Sleazy Main Character, Teenage Death***Black Plastic Bags***Written by: Asa Delaney and Narrated by: Nichole Goodnight***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents. Candy, testimony of the accused.

Written by Atfel and narrated by Alicia Atkins. The modern world is no place for humans. I don't know if you've stopped to think about it lately, but remember 20 years ago? You'd be sitting on the train or at the airport, just watching people pass by, while you waited? Or back when a trip meant writing everything down, getting a map, having to find a kind stranger for directions. You, ma'am, you may not have even been on this earth 20 years ago, but...

Oh, you're 78. Why, I would have sworn... Yes, yes, sorry, I'll continue. Well, my point, which I was getting to, is that food today is also not food for humans. It's barely real. That organic label you see in the stores is complete bullshit. You have 1% that's not made in a factory and you can post it on your product. Did you know? There was a lawsuit a few years back.

I heard about this in Bali. Yeah, I was there for a primal empowerment yoga retreat. Just connecting with our original natural selves and... Yes, I hear you, Your Honor. No, I'm not trying to enter into another lawsuit as precedent in this case. Yes, I realize the Indonesian legal system is civil law and would not be valid precedent in this court. I didn't know it uses the French system.

Look, let's just say it was a story I heard. I heard a story about the canned tuna there was mostly actually insects. It's gross, right? and this is an island nation where they're fishing every day. So my point is, we need something to help us through this modern age. It's harder and harder to maintain healthy habits, and willpower alone isn't enough. The average BMI in the U.S. has grown by 17% since 1970. Now, to a regular person, some dude on the street who hasn't had a society-changing vision in his life,

that's a problem. But I didn't get my MBA from the University of Harvard, the Illinois campus, but it's accredited to think like that. To me, that's a market. So in 2016, we started looking into that market. It was already crowded. Want to know how much the weight loss industry was valued back then? $45 billion. And want to guess how much it's a grown since then, it's doubled. That's how much we as humans are willing to spend to be healthy and confident in the face of the modern food industry, if you can call it that. And the one point I really, really want you to keep in mind as you hear the rest of this whole charade is that it isn't working. We're paying that much, and in return, our mass just keeps creeping up. So,

we wanted to completely disrupt the scene. I'm talking permanent, life-changing liberty. What Twitter did for political discourse and Facebook did for friendships and the news, we're going to do for the human body. And no, that's not an easy task. We assembled a team of the best and brightest, visionaries who wouldn't get stuck in the big diet's mold. We're not trying to do calorie counting or accountability buddies or step counting. Every single one of those apps has failed. We needed to think bigger. Honestly, my first thought was leeches, though I found out later that's mostly blood weight you're losing.

That first year, we didn't have a medical doctor on board yet. But I did some Googling and found out you don't want to lose too much of that. not even over time, like a half pound of blood today, half pound tomorrow. It looks good on the scale, but it's just not sustainable. And sustainability was exactly what we were aiming for. Not a quick fix where you'll see-saw back and forth, or even a long-term habit that depends on your motivation, but something guaranteed, something permanent,

something that will bring in that luxury customer profile. So I'm looking for inspiration and ended up finding it after a trip abroad. The program was called Level Up Your Third Eye. It was run by a friend of mine who had really gotten into ayahuasca. We're out there on the Azuice River. It's in Brazil. It's a lot like the Amazon River, but a little smaller. We're there in these inner areas.

tubes, just vibing, and somehow I ended up with this little infection. It starts off like a rash, but after a couple of days, I was like, whoa, this is a full-on flesh-eating bacteria situation. I spent about two months in the ER, but I came out of it almost 12 pounds lighter, and it was mostly just in my right leg. If it was my whole body, I would have lost way more. We explored that avenue for a while, even went and got a sample of the water to play around with. But it was surprisingly hard to bring it to market. It's really down to body composition. We did some market focus groups, and everyone wants to lose 10 pounds or whatever.

But when you start getting into what it looks like, what they want to change, most of them are talking about magically losing 10 pounds of fat, but keeping all their muscle. And skin. It's not that easy, people. So at this point, we're two years in, still looking for a solution. And the investors are breathing down our necks. And then inspiration struck again. I saw an article about another bacteria that was found in thawing permafrost. Well, in a recovered Willie Mammot's body that thawed from permafrost.

It was a symbiotic parasite, they said, where this bacteria released something into the mammoth's fat cells. Definitely not flesh-eating. I know the science pretty well, but I actually managed to duck out of any biology after seventh grade. So all I'll say is it pretty much changed all the cell receptors. The food that furry guy ate went directly into fat. It could bulk up in the winter even on a diet of grass or leaves.

It was more resistant to droughts and famine periods. He died in a tar pit, but as far as I'm concerned, if he hadn't stumbled in, he'd probably still be with us today. Yes, Your Honor, that's the article I forwarded in Exhibit B-26. The three money signs and the exclamation mark were just my way of saying, Yo, boss, I think there's good potential in this. I wasn't quite sure yet.

but figured if we could reverse this, it would be perfect. So we got a team together. We only had three months of funding left, but found a few really great nutritionists who were willing to do it on points. They can recognize a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Unlike, honestly, the FDA, we started doing trials and got most of the way there. We can make candy.

We picked peanut buttercuffs, but really it could be anything. With these bacteria, and once they enter the body, they can start affecting the receptors in the fat cells. There's a lot more to the science, and you could ask them. Oh, they testified already? Sweet, they probably described it better than I will, but... They said what? I mean, we pushed them, but seriously, they don't have the bigger picture. Like they're not looking at the budget every day.

I had to cut Team Margarita Mondays at Martunas. It was getting tight. So, yeah. I told them to do it as fast as they could. I don't believe in corners. Everything's a straight line if you want it bad enough. I don't know if I said that specifically, but... No, that's correct.

I did not actually have USDA approval for the rats. But they were literally just wild rats I found in the alley. What was their life expectancy going to be? A week? Okay, Your Honor. The point I'm trying to make is just that we could get the bacteria to actually stop your body taking in calories. That's wild! That in itself should have gotten our team, not those two traitors, but for the rest of us, a Nobel Prize. There were other details to figure out,

but this was literally like we back-squotted two plates and just had to land the bar. Two plates on each side. This was about a month ago. We finished testing on the Ratch just after lunch on that Wednesday. Their bodies had not taken in a single calorie in the previous two days. There was a bit of a cleanup after that, but by something like 2 p.m. we were out celebrating. It was epic.

Mikey was there. That's the CTO. And he had his half keg of triple that he got after a meditation retreat in Amsterdam or something. He broke that out and we were playing beer pong in the main conference room. We broke out the smoke machine and it was super legit. But the thing they don't tell you is that the monk's brew is like three times as strong as Miller Light. So just right off the bat, Woosh, we're all pretty lit.

Big T, the CFO, breaks out this Joshy Croto stuff he got. It's supposed to be like Querebo, but with the absinth worm in it, it definitely had this big thing. Look like maybe a millipi to me, and it was strunk. Once we got through that bad boy, we...

Sorry? Oh, oh. I get it, Your Honor. No, totally. But my point is, it's epic, and I don't make it back Wednesday night. None of us did. And Thursday is Halloween. So I wake up to a phone call from home. It's 3 p.m. trick-or-treating starts soon. We need more candy. I'm probably still feeling it at this point, but I'm good to drive back.

Honestly, I'm usually good, like five or six deep. My hand is. is rock steady. But I don't want to get that judgment in the store, so I'm looking around, seeing what's left in the office. I kept a stash of snickers in my desk drawer, and we loaded up on some Hershey bars for the smores and the audit team's office. It's almost enough,

but I'm moving slow, want a little bit more, and I grab the peanut butter cups. I just want to say, first of all, I don't think really I'm responsible for that. I wasn't of, like, sound mind at that point. But to finish with the facts, I get home, I drop a mix of all this into the little plastic pumpkin we keep

and go straight to the couch. I did not hand out the candy, and if I had, I would have totally spotted the peanut butter cups. Jared and Tony, little tea, I'll call him, since... Oh, sorry, Your Honor. Anthony, then. Jared and Anthony, these kids are high schoolers. Shouldn't they be going out to a party or something instead of trick-or-dreating?

Oh, they were with Jared's little sisters. Well, they didn't need to take the candy for themselves, as my point. Now, at this point, I don't really see any of it, but... Uh, sure, I'll read the coroner's report. Just this section? The deceased complained of intense pain in the abdomen in the days prior to their death. These were likened to hunger pains, with Anthony Telegris, comparing it to the three-day period in his youth when he subsided only on two energy bars while lost in the woods.

However, both deceased consumed immense quantities of food. The family of Mr. Telegrear, noting that he consumed approximately 32 ounces of dried pasta after sharing the family meal the evening of Friday, November 1st. This pattern continued in subsequent days, while the two boys increasingly displayed intense fatigue. Mr. O'Neill was an active member of the varsity wrestling team, and during a meet on November 4th, he became unconscious within approximately 10 seconds of the start of his bout. He wrestled substantially above his standard weight class of 157 to 146 pounds, instead weighing in at 256. However, this is not believed to have been a factor in his loss of consciousness,

which he attributed to insufficient nourishment. Both deceased reportedly began to compulsively consume food in the hours' prior to their death, while becoming increasingly lethargic. In the minutes before their deaths, they were both completely unable to lift their arms, and ultimately to even move their mouths to speak. Their manner of death is substantially unlike anything this coroner has seen. Mr. Telegree consumed sufficient quantities, particularly of dry pasta, for his stomach itself to perforate in multiple places,

which would have quickly led to sepsis and internal hemorrhaging. However, both Mr. Telegree and Mr. O'Neill suffered another serious set of injuries, which would have been immediately visible to external observers, including their concerned family members. Notably, their skin ruptured in numerous locations, particularly around their lower abdomens and upper legs. In short, the fact,

the fat deposits in their bodies became so prominent that their epidermies were unable to stretch and contain them. In layman's terms, they would have burst like water-soaked grapes from their own fat deposits. At the same time, chemical analysis of their corpses shows that their muscles contained no accumulation of lactic acid whatsoever, suggesting a lack of any motion prior to their demise. So, again, your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm not one of those science nerds who could tell you what all that means, but my big takeaway is this. We're really close here.

We've clearly got something going on. It's absolutely not my fault that those two guys got involved in testing. We for sure would have gone to the FDA before we did human trials. But pretty soon, we really expect to have this type of miracle food you see on Oprah. And if anyone here has a chunk of cash and wants to get it on the ground floor, now's the time. Breaky Presents Black Plastic Bags, written by Asa Delaney and narrated by Nicole Goodnight. A girl went into the woods alone. It was August and Route 11 was a two-lane strip of sticky tar covered in dead-tenth caterpillars in a shimmering haze heat.

It skewered a patch of state game lands between Colville, Home of the Raiders, and Riverview. Go Tigers. In three weeks, The Girl, 16, Bonie Need would be a senior at Colesville High School. In three weeks, the girl, 16, Bonie Need would be a senior at Colville High School. Most of the summer vacation passed like always. in a blur of sleepovers and movies. But the ranch house she shared with her mom and stepdad didn't have air conditioning, which made it an oven in the summertime.

The hotter the weather, the worst the tempers of the entire family. And this glorious mid-August Tuesday seemed like it would be a scorcher. Today's fight started over breakfast when her stepfather asked why she hadn't cleaned her room. But her six-year-old half-brother was loudly demanding cereal her mother hadn't let her eat. Her stepfather poured that cereal, all sugar, no nutrition. into a plastic Winnie the Pooh bowl, her bowl, the one she'd loved when she was even younger than her brother. It was the most natural thing in the world. Neither her stepfather nor her half-brother looked at her.

They'd stolen her cereal bowl as easily as they'd stolen everything, her space, her time, her mother. This man married her mother, invaded her home, and took her things. He had no real authority over her, because no one ever asked whether she wanted him here or not, because she had no authority. When he said something about the state of her room, she told him it wasn't his business. He wasn't allowed in there whether it was clean or not. He'd said he didn't like her attitude.

She reminded him that he'd never liked anything about her, no matter what attitude she had. That's when it went wrong. He shouted and she yelled back. One barb led to another and in the end, she slammed open the front door and dashed into the front yard. Her stepfather stood on the front porch, calling her name so loud the neighborhood dogs joined in. She didn't turn. She didn't unclench her fists. She didn't slow down until she rounded the corner at the end of the road,

when she heard the front door slam behind her stepfather as he gave up and went inside, which left her wondering where she ought to go. Usually she'd slink like an embarrassed cat to one friend's house or another, but August brought band camp, preseason training, and family trips, and none of her friends had time to hang out. She didn't bring her wallet so she couldn't go to the two fast food restaurants or three gas stations that composed the entirety of Colville's social scene, so she went to the woods. It wasn't so bad to be alone, she thought, if she was alone in the woods. The thick canopy kept the forest from getting too hot, and this steady churn of cicadas kept it from feeling too big and lonesome. She could stay there for hours, and no one would ask any questions or demand she buy something if she was going to take up an entire booth by herself. Her mom worked doubles at the hospital in the larger town 15 miles down the road. She wouldn't be home until late tonight.

This meant that as long as she was home before dark, her stepdad wouldn't even trouble her mom with their argument, and nobody would worry. Colville wasn't the sort of place that showed up on the news. Unlike the cities, the larger towns, and all those scary, faraway places, no one got killed around here. There were no kidnappings or muggings, hardly even any break-ins. The biggest to do was when the river flooded every spring and fall.

The closest Colville got to crime was its runaways, but every town along this stretch of nowhere had a problem with those. Every year a kid or two took a one-way greyhound of Philadelphia or New York where things happened and people mattered. The girl sat atop a hill, maples on one side and pines on the other. She played a game on her phone until her eyes got heavy. Then she leaned back against a stump and let the velvet buzz of cicadas wash over her. A nap sounded nice.

This sort of endless, ageless summer afternoon was made for sleeping and not much else. The crunch and snap of dry leaves and twigs caught her ear, yanking her upright and awake. It was loud, which meant it was close. It was closer than it should have been if she had been alone all this time. She looked down into the cleft of a dry creek bed, up the opposite slope, and out toward Route 11. A man. Halfway between the creek bed and the road. What she could see of him between the brambles and tree trunks

was as much of this place as she was. Sleeves rolled up and fishing permit pinned to his Bass Pro shop cap. She squinted toward the highway's shoulder, where hunters and hikers usually parked but didn't see a car. How did he get here then? The girl had walked but lived on the edge of town and knew all her neighbors. She would have recognized him if he'd lived nearby. No birds sang and no squirrels crashed in the underbrush.

They only held their breath like that for hawks and hunting. The cicadas were silent, too. She wasn't sure when it started, but now that she noticed it, the silence was everywhere. Thick and cold as mud at the bottom of a pond. The man tramped through the little ravine, and she saw different pieces of him as he passed between the trees. He wore loose-fitting jeans and held a shovel in one hand. He dragged something heavy.

He grunted and strained in a plastic bag edged into view. No, two of them. two big black plastic bags. The man paused beside a fallen tree, leaned his shovel against a tray inside. His whole body tilted to counterbalance the bag's weight as he hefted them over the log. As soon as he cleared it, he dropped them again. Their thud even louder than the snap of twigs under their weight. He picked up the shovel and resumed walking, dragging the bags behind him.

The only sounds were the ones he made. His grunts and puffs, his heavy footfalls, his black wreaths, his black plastic bags slid across the dead twigs and dried leaves. She thought maybe that she ought to be frightened, and if this had been a city or the dead of night or winter, she would have been. But bad things didn't happen in this town. Certainly not in the middle of the day or August. Burying trash in the woods made him as strange as her for watching.

Suspicious almost. In a fanciful imaginative corner of her mind, it occurred to her that he might be burying a body. But things like that didn't happen around here, and if they did, they would not on honey-thick summer afternoons. More likely, he'd hit a bear or a wild cat and wanted to avoid the fine. It was too early in the year to burn leaves, and the bags looked too heavy for that to be it. But she could be wrong.

He hadn't seen her yet and probably wouldn't unless she said something. When people looked around, they hardly ever looked up. And, thanks to the steep incline of the hill, she was a good dozen yards up and hidden from view. She thought she should offer him help or call up to say hello. It was rude not to. But then he turned to the left. He had a gun across his back and a knife in his belt. There was no good reason to have a gun like that out here.

Big game season didn't start until the fall. If he shot a groundhog or squirrel with that caliber, it would leave nothing but red mist and scrappy fur. It's not illegal, sure, but it's not the sign of someone's stable either. Guns weren't toys. They were tools. so were shovels, so were knives. A man in the woods with all three

wasn't doing the sort of job that welcomed strangers. The girl wondered if the woods weren't as safe as she'd always thought. The idea was like getting bit by a dog she'd known since it was a puppy. The afternoon felt chilly all of a sudden. Like winter, like the dark, like alone was alone, whether in a big city or a tiny town, and just because nothing unspeakable had happened before, it did not mean it couldn't happen now.

She thought about running. She could get up and be over the next hill in minutes. But deer and turkey did that. They lost their nerve. They tried to run. Hunters, like all predators, noticed motion immediately. She might outrun the man, but she couldn't outrun a bullet. And if she didn't move, the forest would protect her.

And if she did, it would give her away. The man stopped walking and the girl held her breath. He sat down the bags, took the shovel in both hands, and stabbed the ground. Before long the thunk and scrape of digging filled the air. Sweat began to show in patches on his shirt, and dirt piled around him. Whenever his shovel hit a rock, it clanged loud and clear as a baseball in an aluminum bat. The sun glinting off the trash bags made them look like nothing so much as lumpy black beetles. As the minutes stretched the sharp blade of fear dulled, the sweat sticking to her back and armpits got cold.

Noceum's whined in her ear and tangled in her hair. Eventually, the man wiped his forehead with the hem of his shirt, and then dragged the bags, one after the other, into the hole. He buried them with careless shovelfuls of dirt and leaves. When he finished, he leaned on the shaft of the shovel and appreciated his work. Then he turned and headed back the way he'd come. His steps light and quiet and his shovel over one shoulder. He walked uphill, rose into the two-bright orb of the afternoon sun, and disappeared.

The girl squinted against the light and waited for him to step back into show. so she could see what path he'd take. But no matter how long she waited, he didn't reappear. Like blood welling up in a cut, the usual forest noises return. They swelled, thickening and busying the air until the girl doubted the silence in her memory. Maybe it hadn't been real. Certainly there was nothing to fear. But it had been real.

And her fear was, too. It was silent, and it was strange, and it had happened. She would prove it. There was physical evidence just a football field away. She meant to wait to a count of 500, but she lost track. Then she lost track again. And after her third or fourth attempt, she decided she'd waited long enough. She stood, shook the pins and needles from her legs, and picked her way down the slope.

It didn't take long to find the area, mainly because the closer she got, the worse it smelled, like roadkill, like piss and iron, like something dead and rotting. like something dead and rotting. And the nearer she walked, the worse it got. Her stomach clenched. She gagged and spat vinegory bile onto the forest floor. It got up her nose, too, which stung but at least cut the smell. She bent over double, braced her hands on her knees,

and waited for the fist in her belly to relax a little. And right in front of her, plain as day across the dead leaves and dried twigs, the rusty stamp of a boot print, shiny as wet. pain. It was blood. It couldn't have been anything else. She thought again about the bodies, but the woods were warm and peaceful. The cicadas droned their soothing rhythm, and fear rolled off her like sweat. She couldn't make it stick. So he'd probably been burying a dead animal. A deer, maybe, or a bear. Roadkill stank in the summer, and it got messy. That would explain the bloody print, too. There were more bloody streaks, maybe half a dozen, a black plastic bag,

might be right around there. He did a good job covering the spot. Despite the smell, she might have missed it if she hadn't known what to look for. But she did know. She had seen it. So the spider webs didn't fool her. Neither did the wispy tufts of yellowed grass. She could call the police, let them sort this out. Her cell phone still had plenty of battery. The man could come back, dig up the bags, and be off with them before she even reached a place with cell service. And she might not be able to find this spot again once she left. It didn't look any different from the rest of the forest. And what if the cops came and dug up only roadkill or trash? They'd call her hysterical, a dumb girl, bored in looking for attention. After a girl got labeled hysterical,

that was it. No one would ever take her seriously again. And if something bad, really bad, happened to her after that, the cops wouldn't help. Anyway, there was only one way to find out if this was something worth bothering the cops over. So she pulled her shirt collar over her nose and mouth, found a large stick, and started digging. It didn't take long. Beneath the surface, the soil was still fresh turned and moved without much work.

The bags, when she reached them, were disgusting. White wriggling maggots ringed their mouths like dried on toothpaste. When she poked them with her stick, a cloud of flies swarmed out of their puckered openings. They buzzed into her eyes and ears. They caught in her hair and tickled. her neck. She writhed under them, spun in a circle to swat them, winding low in the back of her throat, mentally cursing the man and roadkill in her own stupid curiosity. Then, when she'd finally

waved the last of them away, she got her first good look at the bags themselves. They were trash bags, the cheap store brand sort, overstuffed and ready to burst. They were so full the girl could see the outline of their tightly packed contents, and she knew they were not filled with dead leaves. They were not filled with garbage, not roadkill either. There were human bodies in these bags. She could see them. The bags stretched around hands and gathered in half moons where fingernails nearly bit through the plastic. Shoulders and elbows, feet and legs, bridges of noses and cuts of jaws, body parts, too many to belong to a single person, too disordered to belong to intact bodies, more than one person

More than one person and every last one in pieces in pieces and every piece shoved one on top of the other into two big black plastic bags didn't make sense this was Colville

bad things didn't happen here people didn't even lock their doors at night the closest this town came to crime was runaways oh but of course nobody got murdered sure but plenty of people went missing. Kids stopped showing up for school or part-time jobs.

Their friends cried and their parents put up posters. That's all. Politicians never commented. The police never questioned anyone, at least not as far as the girl knew. The local paper never wrote a word. Kids who disappeared never came back. They never wrote or called or even checked in online. They turned into memories, then ghosts,

and then everyone forgot they had ever been there in the first place. teachers rearranged seating charts to fill gaps, friends found other friends, and dates picked someone else to take to homecoming or prom. Even parents turned off porch lights eventually. The thought washed over her like a cold wave and she looked down at the bags. It felt like she was awake for the first time in years. Her mind scrambling to make sense of a world in color with words that only worked for black and white. Who said they were runaways?

Who said they went to New York or Philadelphia? Every couple of years an officer would come to their school to talk to them about drugs and alcohol, and the dangers of leaving home too young. Teachers said the same thing, and so did parents, so did friends. It was just one of those things, something everybody knew. Then again, everybody knew bodies didn't turn up in black plastic bags in the woods. Things like that didn't happen around here, but they did, and it had. If she called the cops now and if they believed her, they'd tell her not to touch anything.

She'd seen it a thousand times on cop shows, and standing around waiting for the cops to show up would be like telling the bodies in the half-buried bags. Sure, you're important in all, but I'm scared, and that matters more. She couldn't do that. It was too selfish, and the girl didn't like to think of herself as selfish. So, okay, she'd get the bags out first and give them some breathing room, knock loose some of those larvae, then she'd call the cops. She pulled it one, but it was heavy. She changed her grip and tried again, but her hands were slippery with sweat and sore from digging.

The mouth of the bag was damp with maggots, and it didn't have the pool tabs the expensive trash bags did. Even though it sent her stomach scrambling up her throat, she wrapped her arms around the bag and hugged it against her chest. She lifted the way Mrs. Mahoney taught them in gym class, with her legs. She breathed slowly and steadily through her mouth, even though she wanted to hold her breath. The round dome of a skull pressed into her arm through the plastic.

She leaned the bag against a big root and turned back for the other one. When she lifted this one, a foot with itty-bitty toes fisted into her right hand, it was clammy and as soft as a bag of cold oatmeal. She put it next to the other and straightened up, shaking. Touching the bodies was worse than seeing them. Pressed against her chest like this, she couldn't tell herself they were anything other than what they were. She dropped the bags as soon as she'd cleared the hole, wiping her trembling hands down the front of her jeans.

She had to call the cops, but fear sank its teeth into her mind and shook her like a cat shakes a mouse. What made her so sure the cops could be trusted with this if she hadn't trusted them with roadkill? And once she'd thought that, there was no stopping it. But what if the cops already knew? What if the cops knew Colville wasn't as small and safe as it looked? What if the runaways weren't runaways?

What if they had been taken? She needed to calm down she needed to think. Three of her classmates had gone missing in the last two years. She still remembered their faces. If she opened the bags and didn't see anyone she knew, these people probably weren't runaways, but if they were? She tore the first bag open. Water.

The bag was filled with water. No bodies, no rot, just fresh water. Clean and clear enough to drink, save a handful of leaves and sticks floating on its surface. The second bag was the same. They stank to high heaven from the outside, but inside they smelt like a cool, dark pond. Flies kept coming out of the top, and a few flew back in, but there were no flies in the water. She pushed her fingers into the dry plastic and gripped a human arm around the knob of her wrist and the squelch of rotting meat. A nauseating yellow belch of putreed air from the mouth of the bag corroborated what her hands were telling her.

But only from the outside. Inside there was no arm, no meat, no rotting, stinking smell, just clear odorless water, green leaves, a floating twig. She definitely couldn't call the cops. What would she say? If she told the truth she'd sound crazy and if she lied, they'd think she was wasting their time or playing a prank. She wasn't a good liar anyway. They'd see through her at once and call her parents.

But as soon as she thought of her parents, there was the answer. She'd take them home. She'd put the bags in the yard. yard, and then she'd contact the police. She'd say some weird old man with a bass pro shop cap dumped them in front of the house, and she'd stayed inside because he creeped her out. Then she could tell them about the suspicious-looking bags, no problem. She wrapped the mouth of one bag around each hand and hefted them up.

After a dozen steps, her fingers were numb, and her hands were shaking. They were too heavy to carry, so instead she decided to drag them. It would be slower and noisier, but it was better than leaving them behind. It worked for a while at least. But one bag and then the other snagged and ripped open. All that water splashed out over the forest floor and covered the tops of her boots. The day was hot and the dirt was thirsty. In no time at all, nothing remained but the faint smell of wet dirt in the deflated, shapeless, empty bags.

And the afternoon was just an afternoon. And the bags were just bags. And the girl bawled them up and stuck them in her pocket. Then when she got home, she threw them away. After that summer afternoon, she stuck to the paths when she walked in the woods. She watched out for missing person reports. But Colville had more disappearances than she could keep up with, and too few paths to keep her interest. Then school got busy in September.

The river flooded in October, and the strange man in the black bags didn't seem important anymore, like a strange dream or a movie. In November, after Frost Heartland, in the ground, but before the first snow, the girl disappeared, too. Maybe she went to Philadelphia, maybe to New York. One or the other of the big cities where things happened and people mattered. Her mom and stepdad put an ad in the paper, promising a reward for information. Her friends cried and checked their phones for updates that didn't come. They posted missing person flyers outside both fast food restaurants and on the doors of all three gas stations. But those flyers

were covered with homecoming posters. The fire station had a Christmas potluck to raise money to repair the levee October's flood had ruined. Her half-brother stopped asking where she'd gone. The posters with her face and details faded in the sun. The snow made their ink run. The thaw turned them into pulp. When spring came, the prom queen and king nominations were all anyone could discuss. The river flooded again and once more ruined the half-constructed levee. Everyone moved Dawn, and more or less, forgot her name. 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 Sherylite 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.