Creepy - Day 1 - Haunted Under My House & Wheat Stalks

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

Haunted Under My House***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***Wheat Stalks***Written by: R.J. Taylor and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***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.

What you attribute the success to mankind. We're joining us. You got walls and a roof. Your guide to bed. What you're about to hear is a series of radio broadcast captured from a pirate radio signal. These recordings were found intermittently across random frequencies. While each frequency is never mentioned in the program itself, the call letters of the radio station remain the same. As of yet, these programs have not been verified, nor have any of the host or any of the callers been identified.

Listener discretion is advised. What follows for the next 31 days are the recorded excerpts of that program, self-identified as the 31 Days of Horror, line up chronologically based on the music and announcement that preceded each episode, along with a single word. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing

creepy pastures 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.

which listener discretion is advised. It's October, and that means KREP is on the air and ready to guide you through the most magical time of year. 31 days until Halloween. 31 days for us to tell scary tales of the dark, the wicked, and the terrifying. I suppose you could call this day one of the 31 days of horror. Hmm. I like the sound of that. A time of cool winds, falling leaves, costumes, and pumpkins.

When the veil between what we know and what we will never understand is the thinnest, and the darkness that creeps around the shadows is free to play. You're listening to KREP, and I'm your host, The Creep Himself. If you're new to the program, welcome. your timing couldn't be better. I don't think I'm alone in thinking this is the very best time a year. This is the one time a year that the powers it be unchained me from our usual format to talk with you all. The listeners, we want to hear from you.

So let's dust off the phone lines and open them up to you. Tell us your story. Looks like the lines are a little quiet. What's the matter? someone need to knock on your caskets. There we go. Line one, you're on with the creep. Sounds like HR was trying to get a hold of us again.

That'll have to wait till later. Okay, well, you all dust off the cobwebs and remember how phones work. I'll dive into the mailbag. First up is from a man who claims there is something haunted under my house. When I was a kid, there was this one hundred. house in the neighborhood that would set up a sort of haunted house in their garage. We were lower middle class, so don't let your imaginations go too wild. I know that people love to flex their creative muscles online and show up how amazing they are

at homemade shit. That definitely wasn't the world I grew up in. The haunted house in question was, as I said, in their two-car garage. Instead of walls, there were garbage bags hung from the ceilings to make us sort of little maze. There probably weren't more than three or four total turns in the thing. But when I was a kid, it might as well held a minotaur in the middle. I always remembered that haunted house.

They'd never did it before and never did it again. I mean, think about it. This was long before YouTube or anything like that existed, so the people who made it just got an idea and did it. No plans? Nothing. I bet for as simplistic as it was, it probably took days to make. And all it would have taken was one toddler to lose his shit or some asshole middle schooler to tear it all down.

Those are the real memories, as far as I'm concerned. The times when we were met with true wonder, not a purchase, trendy experience filled with expectations. I always wanted to recreate that for my kids, but, well, I've learned that being a parent. is filled with times when you wished you done something more, or something different. Like when I decided to try and fix our leakage problem in the basement by myself. Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out differently. I try not to, though. What's the point?

During quarantine, my wife and I moved out of our split-level house for a two-story further away from the city. I won't go into the why. beyond that we needed more space. There were plenty other reasons, but that's as good as any. At first, it was a dream. Bigger house, bigger yard, more room between us and the neighbors. Really felt like we've gotten lucky after living in the same small, pretty, rundown house

for the last decade, ever since we've gotten married. Back when two people making less than $100,000 combined could still buy a house, Anyway, my wife had taken the kids out of town to visit her parents. I would have joined them, but I had a work deadline. And since I didn't always get along with her family, also added that I'd take a look into the leakage we had in the basement. We'd run into a similar problem in the old house, so I wasn't going in completely blind.

The corner of the basement would get wet if there was sustained rains, and this year was the wetest spring in somewhere I can remember. I think we got more rain in one month than we did all last year. So I hadn't noticed the problem before. And if the problem doesn't exist when the inspector goes through, it doesn't really exist, does it? Until it does. I was annoyed, but to tell the truth, I'd done the same thing.

Yeah, I dug out around our old house, mostly in the area we got the leakage in and installed the drain tile. But there's a good chance I didn't exactly do it right because I noticed the same problem when the rains would get really heavy. I figured with at least some experience, I could figure what was going on, and worst case scenario realized pretty quickly that I was in over my head and call an expert. Only one of those things happened. When I went down into the basement to check the area of our storage space that had seen the water,

Water looked like there was a small crack in the cinderblock wall, down low in the corner. I grabbed my flashlight and took a look. I couldn't imagine water was coming in there by the size of it. Not that it was too small, but that it was too big. If water was leaking in there, you'd think our baseman would be a swimming pool. I tapped at it with my screwdriver and immediately regretted it as I saw bits of the bricks start to crumble away. I immediately knew there had to be water in there. I mean, I'd never seen a cinder block just sort of turned it dust before.

It had to be from erosion, right? And it's not like it was a whole thing, just one small part around a crack on the floor. Still, it didn't seem safe, so I went to the hardware store to get some crack sealant. You know, that liquid stuff that you spray in and expands. I figured that should at least be enough to hold things off while I go outside and look into doing more drain tile. I even had a DIY video on how to do it pulled up so I went back into the basement with the sealant. I was about a minute into the video, spraying the foam into the crack, when the slow realization hit me that something was wrong.

I looked up at where I'd inserted the spray tube into the crack, but didn't see any sealant foaming out of it like I'd always seen from similar project. Not only that, but when I pulled the can away, I realized from the weight that it was empty. I'd sprayed an entire tube of seal in there, and the wall just sucked it right up. All kinds of feels hit me at the same time, and none of them were good. There had to be space behind the block where the ceiling was expanding. Maybe a rodent hole or some kind of animal trying to get into the foundation. We'd had a really warm winter, and I'd heard from other people that rodent problems were on the rise

since instead of nesting their burrows under the snow, they were out and about looking for their warm places to nest. I've never done a DIY project that took less than three trips to the hardware store anyway, so I jumped in my truck and headed back, returning with a chisel, some cock, and a few cinder blocks. My plan, which was probably pretty dumb, was to chip away at the existing brick and replace it. I'm not amazed by any stretch of the imagination, but I figured it was a lot safer for me to try and get the block replaced and to keep one there that was ready to crumble away. I'll never know. But it was dumb in its own way. I know as soon as I started to work away at that block that something was wrong.

The light I was shining into the area went wrong. right into the hole I was opening and disappeared. There was no foundation behind it, not even any dirt, just emptiness. I took a little more away, slowly, making sure that my own curiosity didn't lead me down an even dumber road than what I was already doing. When it was wide enough to reach my hand in, I grabbed a flashlight and shined it in the hole, waiting for the jump scare of an animal hissing at me and leaping from its little home. Well, that didn't happen.

I focused on the fact that what I was looking at looked like a tunnel. Something you'd see cavers going into. I mean that. It wasn't dug into the dirt, but instead into rock. Evidently, our house's foundation had been cut into a layer of bedrock or something. Okay, that was unexhaired. expected. After taking a lunch break to think about things, I decided to go back to the store. This time, instead of hardware, I came home with a selfie stick and a cheap small spy drone.

Sadly, the selfie stick didn't expand far enough into the hole to see an end or even a turn. So I played with the spy drone for about an hour, trying to get a handle of the controls. The hole was maybe only about three feet around at best, so there wasn't a lot of room for air if I didn't want to slam the drone. into the tunnel wall. Surprisingly enough, the little thing was fairly easy to control, and I was able to ease it down the tunnel. It turned out that the selfie stick was just a little bit too short before I could see that there was a small drop in the tunnel.

Then things started to open up and sort of wind back towards the house and down. Sort of spiraled around for what I estimated to be about 50 yards or so before dropping away again into a space that... Well... I guess I'll just say that it was a huge fucking cave. Big enough to fit a two-story house in. How do I know that? Because there was a fucking house down there.

That image you just got in your head? Yeah. That. Not some rock and clay structure that some primitive culture might have built lacking modern construction equipment and supplies. No. a fucking house. Two stories, gothic as shit,

like Lurch was going to come to the front door and say, You rang. That. It was under my house. Literally. Pull up my address, and you see my house. Then take an x-ray,

and about 30 or 40 feet down is another house built in the middle of a huge cavern. Don't bother coming up with, questions to ask. I've already asked them. And I don't have any answers. No, I have no idea how it got down there. No, the sellers didn't inform me of another house hidden beneath my house. In fact, I thought I had to be a gag for the longest time. I tried to convince myself that the drone had messed up. It was cheap. Maybe whatever signal it was sending was mixed up, broadcasting some found footage movie or something.

Listen, I don't fucking know, okay? What in the hell was I supposed to think? Maybe if I was a little younger, I'd do some live stream or something. But at the end of the day, my biggest concern was the fact that my house

was sitting on top of what amounted to a huge open cavern. I've seen sinkhole stories in the news, and the idea that the earth can just open up and swallow houses, cars, and peatball is scary enough. But when you know that where you lay your head is that much more likely to disappear into the earth? Come on. Honestly, that's kind of what I thought must have happened to the house

I was looking at. Sinkhole. I don't know how fast or slow they can appear, so there's just as likely a chance that it slowly sunk into the ground like quicksand as anything else. It definitely didn't look like it just dropped 50 feet. From what I could see in the video, structurally, it looked completely fine. What do you even Google in a case like that? What do I do if I find a house buried under my house? Okay, I actually did that.

And no, there's no helpful answer. All the results just kicked back, buried bodies and shit like that. Now, I'm not oblivious to the way world is. I know there are people out there who lose their shit with excitement at the idea seeing what I saw. They'd want it fully documented, trying to go viral, blah, blah, blah. Some jackass would crawl right into the tunnel with no concern about the tunnel collapsing, getting stuck, or the fact that the tunnel itself just sort of opened up into a chamber and crawling in would most likely result of me falling 30 feet to the ground and breaking most

of my bones in the process. No, I didn't go into the hole. Actually, when I was on the couch trying to Google things, I'd just seen a story about a guy in India who'd found an entire village worth of tunnels built under his house when I started to get drowsy. I was physically and mentally exhausted. And while I'd been considering leaving the house

and getting a hotel room, I ended up closing my eyes. I had a nightmare. A nightmare that I crawled into that tunnel, made my way through the turns and the total darkness, crawled my way down the rock wall and sat down in front of the house. It was staring at me just like I was staring at it. Somehow I could see. There was no light down there, no flashlights, no flares, but there was from the house. The windows glowed yellow, flickering like candlelight.

I looked down at my soil clothes. There were tears in it from the rock. My hands looked raw and peelings if I'd draped my open palm across stone. And they hurt. I wasn't asleep. I was there. I was in that cave. I was sitting in front of that house.

As impossible as I would have said such a thing. thing could be, I must have crawled into the tunnel. My mind so focused on what was going on that my body went there, even when I was asleep. Panic hit me so hard I couldn't even stand. How the fuck was I going to get out of there? How the fuck had I even gotten in there in the first place? It was hard to tell from the shadows being cast from the house, but I was pretty sure I could see the tunnel entrance, and it was at least 30 feet above.

me. I did some rock climbing in college, but most of it was in gyms with modular holes, not this. Not something where falling meant injury or death. But what was my alternative? I didn't have my phone. Of course I didn't. That would be too easy. If I had, maybe I could have avoided what was to come, assuming I could get a signal underground, which was doubtful. I was barely able to use my phone in subways. Would it be something?

Something tangible. Something to focus on. Something that would have made me pay less attention to the ringing. The ringing of a phone coming from inside the house. In the absence of any sort of rationality, we cling to irrational

like a life preserver. I think it's human nature and need to understand things. Regardless of what you believe, you believe in some kind of truth. Religion, science, total random chaos, you think there's some kind of answer. You have no real idea of the truth,

but you pick the truth that makes you feel best to get you out of bed in the morning. When all the truth you've ever known is gone and you find yourself in a twisted vacuum, Anything that even seems a little familiar and safe is like a breath of fresh air. That's what the phone ringing sounded like. Something. Something to focus on and to hold on to.

That's why I went inside. It's that simple. That's why I didn't try to climb out. I had to answer the phone. I walked up those front stairs, each creek rippling through my bones. My nervous system was completely on edge. Each step felt like it was going to be the last step I'd ever take. I constantly felt like I was about to throw up.

I don't know if this is how it feels before you're about to die, but I think I understand how people can beg for death when they're in so much pain that they can't stand it. Physically I was okay, minus some minor scrapes. But my mind? I've never felt so over. I was alone, lost, in every definition of the word. And then, I walked into the house.

The inside looked like how I'd have figured from the outside, with the door opening into a large foyer. It was completely empty, save for some candles on the banisters, giving off a horrible flickering glow. A set of stairs in front of me had a rope strung across it with a hand-painted sign that said, off limits, then some words under it that looked Spanish or Italian or something. To my left there was a set of double doors, but they were closed with a chain wrapped around handles and a huge rusted padlock hanging in the middle. My eyes drifted to the floor where there was a neon yellow line on the ground leading to the door to my right, just like a path marked for a haunted house.

I couldn't go to the left The idea going upstairs held no interest to me And frankly Going to the right felt like a trap That's where the ringing was coming from The cadence had slowed down So I'd only hear it maybe every 10, 20 seconds Just enough to let me know I was still there

I followed the lines into the first room It was dark so I only took a couple of steps in, doing what I could to stay in the candlelight. I thought I was close enough to the door that it wouldn't be able to shut without me blocking the way. Of course, I was wrong, and the slamming of the door felt like a punch to the chest. I tried to reach out to find the door handle, but kept finding nothing but air. No matter how many steps I took. I stopped, terrified of what I might end up walking.

into or reaching out for. The scratch of a match strike made me spin. There was enough glow in the room for me to see that I was standing immediately in front of the door and I should have been able to feel it without stretched hands. How would I miss it? Not that I could dwell on that. When I saw who or what had struck the match. On the other side of the room, I saw, I don't know, a person.

light a candle on the table and step away just toward the edge of the shadows. She or he or it turned to look at me. I mean, I think it was a she, but I couldn't tell beyond that it was wearing a filthy and stained mumo dress. It was short and wide, heavy enough that I couldn't see a neck, just a head and a round body. Not that I could take my eyes off its face. It had a Glasgow smile like the Joker. It looked like its lips have been chewed or cut off, revealing horrible teeth.

And its eyes, so wide. Dried blood on its face from where the eyelids have been cut off. It looked at me, then at the ground. At the line that continued to run through the room, then back up at me, as if reminding me to keep walking. Something about the motion made me feel better, if that makes sense. Like I was a part of some prank. It was telling me to keep walking, but why?

Why if this was some hellish place I wasn't meant to be and would it care? I hugged the wall opposite the smiling thing, making sure to stay out of arm's reach. It moved slowly, but I wasn't taking any chances. I kept my eyes on as I reached the open door on the other side of the room. I think that's exactly what it wanted, because before I realized what had happened, I'd crashed to the ground on my shoulder. Pain shot through my collarbone, and I hollered more out of surprise than injury. I tried to scramble back to my feet.

but had a hard time keeping my balance, only then realizing what I'd slipped in, a floor covered in blood and entrails. More candles have been lit there without my noticing, than the shadows danced over all the faces. At least ten of them. Children, sort of, but evil, were hung. dark eyes, wide grins. Some had white eyes, others missing parts of their face and ragged clumps, and they were all chained to the floor by their ankles. I looked around the room and saw the line on the ground leading to the far wall. The blood and guts covered the floor except for a space

and maybe a foot on either side of the line. I took a step without realizing it when I heard the phone ring in the distance. Then another step as I hurried out of the room turning back to look and make sure I wasn't followed. Only to see the smiling thing from the first room, walk into the room I just left, go right up to one of the children, and let it take a bite out of the fat on its arm. Then it started to laugh. No one has ever been so grateful to have a door slammed in their face as I was in that moment to be saved from any more of those things.

I realized quickly that the house wouldn't let me see what was in the next room until I was there. Then candles would light or be lit. And I'd see the faces of damnation all around me. As long as I stayed on the line, I was safe. At least that's what I told myself. And I towed that line like someone tightrope walking over the Grand Canyon. slow, steady, trying not to see what was all around me, not even realizing that I've been walking in a straight line for too long.

Too many rooms from what I'd seen on the outside of the house. Just room after room of abominations that made me resent being able to see it all. Parts of corpses strewn on the ground, moaning in their own pile of entrails. bodies that looked fused and warped together, screaming and laughing at the same time. Some rooms had scenes like a haunted house. Dental surgery, a slaughterhouse, a morgue, over and over again. And all I had to cling to was the line. And the idea that the sound of the ringing phone was getting louder and louder.

A redhorn demon smiled at me from the corner as it pushed its fingers, into a man dressed like the pope with bleeding eyes and no tongue, a bathtub filled with blood and intestines, moving on its own. People hanging from barbed wire nooses, faces torn off and then hanged from nails on the wall, still laughing. Each room got worse, more surreal, before life began to stop making sense at all.

The memories of my wife and kids faded. I had no job. I had no past. I had no future. I truly believed I had died and gone to hell. And finally, after I'd walked until the sun burnt out, and all life had ended, until hell was more real than anything else,

when there was no life beyond the line I walked on. I stepped into an empty room, where the line ended at a small table. On top, sat a phone, and it rang, and I picked it up because it was a ringing phone. And there was no other world than the hell of my life. I don't know what I expected to hear, or if my mind even held on the concepts like conscious thought anymore. I felt broken. So broken, I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream, but I understood the laughter.

I put the receiver to my ear and a voice whispered, Welcome home. I think I started crying because it was a voice, something normal, something that felt real. I told that I wanted to go home, but it just repeated that I was home and not to worry. My wife and children's sleepwalk too. Something inside me snapped and I spun around, seeing no door, only the table, a phone,

and a window. There was never a moment when I considered trying to go back the way I came to tempt fate that the line would save me, to force myself to see those things again. Instead, I ripped the phone from the table and hurled it at the glass, which actually shattered on impact. I crawled out of the house and back into the cavern. Then to the wall, sweating, trying to ignore my burning muscles as I struggled my way back up to the tunnel.

Adrenaline and fear made me a better climber in that moment than I'd ever been in college. There's a saying in climbing that people who do solo climbs without ropes, they never consider the possibility of falling. That was me in that moment. there was no concept of failure, only escape, only doing all I could to stop my family from seeing what I'd seen. Or worse, finding ourselves on the outside of the lines in that house, I thought I would have felt better calling out of the hole, but I didn't feel anything other than panic.

The house was still down there. The tunnel leading to it was still there. There, I'm working on a way to figure out how to fill in the tunnel. I want it gone. I'm going to seal it off, sell the house, and pray I stop having those nightmares. My wife and kid will be home tomorrow. But I don't think I can let them back in. I'll come up with some kind of excuse, CO2, rodent, something.

Anything to keep them away from this. Because one simple thing occurred to me once I got out. something someone out there might have already thought of. Where did the tunnel come from in the first place? Had it been something a previous owner built? Did someone build a tunnel from the basement into a cave and decided to build a house down there? Could they have had their own nightmares that led them to that place? A place that maybe they're still in?

But then why does put up some cement blocks? And honestly, how did they have? even get through the layers of bedrock? No. My real fear isn't that house or how I got there or even the idea that something could happen to my house. My real fear is the tunnel. I'm afraid that it wasn't there.

That it's new. And that someone or something was trying to escape from it. Then maybe I didn't crawl down there when I was asleep. that maybe, just maybe, something dragged me down there. Now, a quick break to pay the bills and keep the hellfires burning. Welcome back all you little creepers out there. This is KREP, and as always, I'm your host, The Creep.

Looks like the phone lines have finally dug their way out of the grave. Caller, you're on with the creep. Am I seriously on the air? You better believe it. I hear you got a story to tell us. Yeah, I just wanted to tell you about something that happened to me recently in the wheat stalks. Not a lot of trick-or-treating goes on in Gardner, Kansas, which is a shame, because the town is especially beautiful in the fall.

Every side street has an orange ceiling, and when the wind presses against the treetops, leaves rain from the sky, like harmless chunks of napalm. Pick-up trucks outnumber sedans in Gardner, and at Halloween time, many of their woodside trailers are filled with bales of straw and parked, waiting for a night that calls for a hayride. Children swim in ballpits full of corn.

Pumpkins are overpriced, but warm cider is cheap. Gardner is a town that knows how to do October as well as anywhere. But, on the 31st, most of that festive energy is packed into minivans and zipped up the freeway. Families scatter across western Kansas to walk the streets of friends or relatives, knocking on doors that are safer than the ones in their own neighborhood. The days leading up to Halloween are as exuberant as a full house on Christmas morning. But when the entire family heads off to Grandma's house, Gardner the dog, is left to lie on the rug in silence.

The few who stay in town on Halloween night do so with caution. Every parent walks up every driveway and stands on every porch, sometimes resting shotgun barrels on their shoulders. The police department is hard at work, scooping up those who stroll the streets without supervision. The entire town keeps their ears to the ground and turns in earlier than necessary. And despite all of this wariness, every year in Gardner, Kansas, trick-or-treaters die.

22 Halloween ago, it happened for the first time. Since then, theories surrounding who could be behind the attacks have been whispered like scandalous gossip. Some believe that the murders have been the result of coordinated collaboration, that somewhere, in a remote barn or secluded basement, there gathers a growered. group of twisted fanatics eager to carry on the tradition. Others suggest that all of these tragedies have been at the hands of one man. They speculate about what the man may look like, and some even claim to have glimpsed his dark silhouette in a lit entryway just before the door closed. They say the brim of his straw hat covers his face. But even those with the most inventive imaginations

do not suggest that they have seen him up close. If there have been any survivors, none of them have spoken out. Gary Parks believes the town is possessed by a demon who only takes corporeal form one night a year. Gary believes that this monster's power is only activated when it stands behind a door that gets knocked on, like a reverse vampire. What Gary doesn't know is a consistency

among the murders that has been present since the beginning. It is a detail that is kept even from most police officers in an attempt to limit hysteria. Dozens of bodies have been found on or after Halloween over the past 22 years, and each of them wore puncture wounds. Four identical lacerations placed a few inches apart. Some were dead before they were stabbed. In the early years, the entry wounds were thinner,

and more shapely, but as the steel or iron has become duller, the holes in the skin have become jagged. Every victim has been stabbed with the same pitchfork. The death tolls have dropped steadily over the course of two decades, as residents become more and more aware. Preparation and communication have improved annually as the town prays this will be the year that ends the streak. But there is always at least one family that's left out of the loop. The pants were too short, and the black belt had faded to more of a charcoal. There were wrinkles set into the back of the jacket that his mother couldn't get out with any amount of ironing. The headband had been lost in the move. His parents had asked him all month if he wanted to go shopping

for a new costume, but Caleb didn't think it was worth the trouble. He had gotten this ghee three Halloweens ago, when he was obsessed with Cobra Kai, and he had worn it every year since. Why bother with a new costume? He couldn't wear it to school because he didn't go to school, and anyone who saw him trick-or-treating would forget who he was within a month or two. Next fall, he'd be in a different town, probably wearing the same karate uniform. Caleb put the jacket on over the t-shirt he was wearing, tied the belt around his waist, flipped himself off in the mirror. From outside came the muted hum of stampeding machinery and the low drone of an air horn. In his window, he saw a train slip into frame to his right,

letting out blaring bursts of sound as it approached the crossing beside the gas station at the corner of Sullivan and Prescott. Nothing else could be seen for a half-acre apart from the fields of wheat and a pale-green ranch that had been converted into a church. For the last three weeks, Caleb had watched diverse colonies gather at the church for special fall services and trunk or treating in the parking lot. A couple of times he'd squinted through the window at fragments of Halloween movies projected on the screen that hung before the altar. He had thought of asking his parents if he could go, but had decided against it.

They were not averse to religion, but they wouldn't have wanted him getting attached to the town. A piercing scream came from downstairs, and the light steps of his mother tumbled down the hallway. He followed her into the living room and found his little brother, Carter, standing on the arm of the couch, peeking out the window. A navy blue truck parked in the long driveway and delivered the last of Carter's costume. Caleb stepped onto the porch and picked up the sealed plastic bag. next to it set a can of yellow spray paint with a sheet of printer paper tied around it. He scooped up the can and stepped inside.

The bag was snatched from his grasp before he could close the door, and Carter's painted white face disappeared behind his black robes. Caleb removed the paper from the can and unfolded it. In large, bolded font, the note read, This Halloween, please do your parts in keeping our town safe. If you will not be home tonight, paint an X on your door.

If you are staying in town to trick or treat, do not approach a door with an X painted on it. Sunflower Pride painting has graciously offered to repaint any X'd doors on November 1st, free of charge. Find them on Facebook. Caleb's mother scanned the note and chuckled. Why not just hang a sign saying, my house will be empty and unguarded all night. With his back turned to Caleb and his mother, Carter took the ends of his cloak into either hand and raised his arms to form a billowing black diamond.

He turned around and revealed plastic fangs and a bloody chin. Caleb's father pretended to marvel at his son's costumes for a moment and then went back to tapping on a keyboard. He was a contractor, which from what Caleb could tell meant that he stared at the computer screen until his phone rang, and then he would either yell at someone or get yelled at. And then he would hang up and stare at the computer screen until the next phone call. It also seemed to mean that he made a lot of promises that would go unkept.

He promised the people on the phone that the project would be done in six months, even if it wound up taking eight. Andy promised his family that they would soon lay down roots, buy a house and get a dog. Without looking up from the screen, he told his wife and sons to begin trick-or-treating without him. He said he would catch up to them before they made it to the second street. He promised he would catch up.

Carter's cape sailed behind him as he darted to the front passenger door of the sedan. Caleb slunk into the back seat, and his mother drove the boys to the end of the driveway, which was longer than a football field and led to Sullivan Road. On the other side of Sullivan was a crowded subdivision lined with rows of houses. The boys and their mother mounted the sidewalk and entered the first cul-de-sac to their right. The sun set over an empty, quiet street. Caleb's mother rolled her eyes at the number of homes that had yellow X's painted on the door.

They knocked on every door that didn't have an X, and about half of them were answered. People stepped onto their porches with wide eyes and tense shoulders, executing the transaction as quickly as possible, before politely closing and locking their doors. Others applauded their mother for her bravery. She hid her annoyance by walking ahead of the boys. She had never been one for small-town quirks. On the other side of Sullivan Road, Caleb's father hung up the phone and answered the door.

Two uniformed deputies greeted him, asking if he would be staying in for the night. They suggested he paint a yellow X on his door before leaving to meet his family. When Caleb's father asked why, the deputies told him. The streetlights turned on over Walnut Drive. This was the street that connected each of the circles, squares, and by-streets of the neighborhood. The boys had turned on to each of them, but had been successful with less than 15 houses. Their mother flashed a smile at the end of every driveway,

but her shoulders were beginning to slouch. Even Carter's excitement was waning. He hung his head and swung his near-empty bucket with his gate. The next turn-off was on the left-hand side of Walnut. The first house on this street sat on a hillside, isolated from its neighbors. There was an X on the front door, but the garage was open. A shiny white SUV was parked on one side, and the rest of the garage was empty. Next to the SUV was a folding table with a large bowl overflowing with candy.

Caleb's mother walked ahead and looked around the garage, then stopped next to the table and gestured at the bowl. Carter asked if he could take more than one, and his mother asked, why not? There wasn't exactly a lot of competition tonight. Then the garage door was ripped from its track and slammed shut. The overhead light blinked off. Metal components bounced off the cement floor and rang in Caleb's ears. His mother's voice called in the dark. The screen of her phone lit in her hand.

Her eyes were wide. The light moved to his brother who was shaking, pointing at the figure behind her. A straw hat floated over her shoulder. Caleb heard the breath. before he saw the movement. It was a quick, automated burst from the nostrils. His mother's back straightened and her waist thrust forward. Four black holes appeared in her gut and a puddle formed in her jacket. Her phone fell face down and Caleb's vision was gone once more. A series of popping sounds from where she stood like fingers snapping sporadically

an esophagus siphoning blood from tattered lungs. Caleb reached out and found Carter's face, then his arm. He yanked his brother toward him, and something toppled over, aluminum scattered over his feet. Chocolate squished beneath his sneakers. He took three quick strides and his shoulder rammed into the garage door. His palms slid down the vinyl until his knuckles hid pavement. His fingers were skinned as he forced his hand between the concrete and the door's seal. With his back hunched over, he lifted and saw a sliver of blue moonlight.

Behind him, another nasal exhale like a practiced surgeon. A wet, guttural scream that sounded like it came from the ceiling. Caleb forced his arm into the slot, then his head, then his waist. The chilly wind inflated the white sleeve of his jewell. jacket and goosebumps made the nightmare leaving. His left hand, which still held his modest bag of candy, jacked up the door as his right arm pulled Carter from the other side. As soon as his feet kicked through, the door fell with a crash that echoed down the street. For a moment, the boys stood blinking at the door, their breath caught in their throats. Caleb imagined

what was taking place on the other side in the darkness of the garage. He listened for the sound of footsteps scrambling after them. He only heard deep breath of a nose. Caleb sensed Carter, mimicking his every move. His chest bounced and so did Carter's. Tears started in four eyes as four legs shuffled down the driveway and around the corner. When Caleb screamed into the night, so desperate that the word was unintelligible to anyone listening, Carter's voice followed.

His little brother was too terrified to act on his own. Every door the boys passed seemed to wear a yellow X. They approached a couple of them anyway, but the foreboding glow of the paint frightened them back down the driveway each time. In Gardner, on the night of Halloween, there is simply no telling which doors are safe to knock at. Running east on Walnut Street, Caleb saw a break in the darkness. On the other side of Sullivan Road, a half-mile from where he stood, the porch light of his home

glowed over the front door. Caleb threw himself toward the light, not bothering to check for traffic when he reached the end of the subdivision. His heart felt ready to burst when he reached the halfway point of the driveway. Carter bound in front of him, weaving his hands in the night and calling for his father. As the boys reached the porch, An alarm rang in Caleb's mind. Something had changed.

Carter leapt the patio stairs, and the light shone off his silk cape. He threw back the screen door and gripped the knob, but it didn't turn. His fist wrapped on the door. His tears choked him. He called for his father. Caleb stood at the base of the stairs, calculating. Behind the screen, an X had been spray-painted in yellow. Caleb turned his back to the door and took in the night.

His eye sockets throbbed. Beneath Carter's panicked screams, a battalion of crickets filled the night with their chirps. What was different? The X. Yellow spray paint. The note wrapped around the can. Stay away from the doors with yellow X's, the note had said.

But what if there's an X on your own door? He looked at the driveway, which was more like a runway. What was different? Tire tracks in the gravel. The parking spot of his father's truck was empty. Both parents gone. The porch light turned off. Caleb yelled after his brother as he climbed the stairs.

Carter turned to face him just as the X disappeared and the door swung open. Four metal prongs shot from the darkness behind a wall. a wooden shaft. They burst through the screen and landed with a squelch. Carter's hand met Caleb's just as he was thrust forward. His eyes widened and his brow spiked. Caleb only held eye contact with his brother who refused to look down. Carter's mouth opened but made no sound. Black fluid spilled over his lower white fangs, mixing with the red dye that had dried on his chin. He was hoisted into the air, and the wind lifted his robes, making him a flying vampire. His eyes rolled.

He was flung backwards and sucked through the empty space in the screen door. Caleb ran. The tall grass that lined the driveway had never been so crowding. He felt the width of the path shrinking. Soon the grass would collapse on and suffocate him. He envisioned Carter's painted jaws gyrating as he fought for his life. last breath, wondering when his big brother would run into the house in assume a karate stance, ready to fight off the monster. He reached the end of the drive and found his mother's car. The back

door was unlocked. Caleb climbed in and wedged himself onto the floor between the front and back seats. He folded himself over and sobbed, hugging his knees. It was over an hour before he heard an engine droning nearer. Caleb's father, had called his wife three times with no answer. In his mind he saw the terrified eyes of the deputies, alert, caffeinated, unsettled on the longest night of the year, telling the lore of Gardner on Halloween. With a shaking hand, he had painted a sloppy X on the front door and unlocked his truck. For the last five months he'd been overseeing a project in Cederside, an even smaller town that was an eight-minute drive down 56 highway. He had seen the local vendors trade glances when they heard he was staying

in Gardner. He had chalked it up to backwood's paranoia. They were only ghost stories. He had never even bothered to Google it. Now, panic was beginning to grip him as his truck idled down Walnut Street. He hadn't seen a single trick-or-treater, and nearly every door was axed out. Finally, he found a house on Oak Circle with a light on in the door. When he knocked at the door it swung open eagerly. Behind it he saw the silhouette of a man in a straw hat, holding a four-pronged pitchfork. Caleb felt the gravel vibrate beneath the undercarriage.

He heard the metal tread of the wheel skipping from one ribbon of rail to another, the high-frequency whistle of air brakes, almost as inaudible as a dog whistle. and just before the blasting horn swallowed all sound, he heard a shrill noise so faint that only the focused ear could pick it up, the terrified scream of a child. He had been cowering in the backseat of the car for so long

that he half expected to see the sunrise. His eyes had been stuck to the roof of the car, waiting for it to crawl with the bright beams of headlights. His father still hadn't caught up. Briefly, Caleb had thought he saw the remnants of blue and red lights flashing between the houses across the street. He had visualized his mother's body outlined in chalk. He had imagined pulling his brother away from the shadow in the door, just before the spears erupted through the screen. He had fantasized about being given another chance to act, either by God or by Satan, no matter the cost.

Then he felt the floor shake, heard the floor. the steel roll in the brakes whistle. He heard the horn blare, and before that he heard a scream. As the train built a wall of sound that ran through his backyard, he got out of the car and walked to the end of the driveway. He peeked around the corner of overgrown grass and saw Sullivan Road, an empty tunnel of pavement and hay. His feet approached the solid white shoulder line and hesitated. He scanned the frozen subdivision across from him, and then turned to run along the road. His arms swung to his cheeks, and his knees lifted, and soon he was panting. The pants of his ghee bunched at the knees, and his shins were bare.

His eyes followed the white line in front of him, but his focus remained on the walls of wheat in his periphery, expecting a shadow to emerge from them at any moment. The stalks bent as their furry heads moved back and forth in the wind, layering on top of one another like the feathers of a vulture, completely unpredictable in their movement. The breath seemed to meet his ears again, those calm premeditated gusts from the nostrils, completely in control, giving the man exactly as much power as he needed, and no more, wasting no energy.

The arm swinging as long. if the pitchfork was weightless, dripping with the blood of Caleb's family. The breath was just behind him now. The exhalation became more of a grunt with every foot gained. Caleb swung his arms harder, dug deeper into the pebble-covered shoulder. He was too afraid to peek behind them, but the shadowy wings of the hay became increasingly inviting. Just before he veered through the ditch and dove into them, they disappeared. Prescott Road came in division. The flashing lights of the railroad crossing, the bell ringing, the gate arm outstretched

in front of the rolling containers. On the other side of Prescott, gas pumps stood under fluorescent lights. Behind them, a convenience store with its lights off. Caleb heard another scream. Music and voices blended with the wind that rushed past his ears. At the opposite corner of the intersection, the little green greener. church stood with its door swung inward. The glow of the projector splattered light over the front porch and through the stained glass. His foot caught asphalt in front of the stop sign, and his palms

slapped the pavement just in time to catch him. The breath behind him strained, louder than the railroad. He looked for the shadow of a pitchfork on the ground next to him, expecting fierce pain at any moment. His hands burned as he pressed and climbed to his feet. He lugged himself diagonally through the intersection, climbing the ditch and approaching the clamor within the church. It wasn't until he reached the porch with his heart firing in his lungs compressing air that he built the nerve to turn around. The street was empty. The last axle of the train squealed out of sight. The white and red arm raised, letting invisible cars pass over the tracks. The bell stopped ringing, and the lights went dark.

The crickets returned to center stage with their song. Caleb collapsed under the porch and wet his smarting hands with tears and cool sweat. He searched the Midwestern night. Across a sea of wheat, he saw a yellow rectangle glowing in the distance. his bedroom light had been turned on. Behind him the noise of the movie had dampened. The light crawling over the porch was weaker but still present. Caleb rose to his feet,

took a deep breath of small town Halloween air, and crossed the threshold. The small foyer opened unto what was once a living room. The wall separating the kitchen had been knocked down, and midway through the sanctuary the glossy hardwood. turned to tile. The screen reflected off the shiny refrigerator and stove top that stood in the corner of the room. A slightly elevated pulpit stood in the center, and in front of it, the projector screen hung. The screen was black, and white letters rolled over it as movie credits ran. The pews were

nothing more than thin rows of folded chairs. Every chair was empty. Under the soft theme of the film, Caleb heard a terse breath through the nostrils, an efficient, collected exhale. The front door was wide open, standing flat against the wall. The shadows of the entryway had hidden its face from the unfocused eye. The light reflected over a brightly painted yellow X. The people of Gardner, Kansas, will try again next year. Looks like my time is up for tonight.

I can hear the knocking at the door from all the creepy crawlies out there. But I'll be back tomorrow and every day this October with more tales from the darkness from our listeners. Thank you all for joining me in the shadows. I'll catch you all again tomorrow. This is the creep, and you're listening to KREP. Today, tomorrow. For more information on the... 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-like 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.