Creepy - Day 13 - Seastead & Institute for Psychic Recovery

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Seastead***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***Institute for Psychic Recovery***Narrated by: Nate DuFort and Danielle Hewitt***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***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.

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. It's October, and that means KREP is on the air and ready to guide you through the most magical time of year. It's day 13 of the 31 days of listening to KRE.

The creep. First up is a message from a listener who knows a thing or two about a subject that many people might not have even heard of. His last job taught him that one thing he never wants to do again is Seestead. I'm not sure how familiar anyone is with the term seesteading. But it usually helps if you think about that Tom Cruise movie where he and Nicole Kidman are in the old West

and after Ron to try and get a parcel of land. It's called homesteading. And I guess it still happens sometimes in certain parts of the world. You get some land, but in... in turn needed to do something with it, grow something, contribute somehow. And if you do, the land is yours to hand down to your family. Sea-steading is just the next step in that, so they say. Literally picking a spot in the middle of the sea or ocean and claiming it is yours.

I'm not going to get into legalities and logistics of any of it, because it's too damn complicated and crazy to try and explain. let alone the mentality to try and do something so crazy. But it happens. I'd never even heard of the term before I got tasked with a team. And even when I looked it up, I couldn't find anything to suggest that it was even a functional idea. Everything seemed to be in the planning stages

or on hold due to lack of financing. Of course, big businesses are trying to figure out how to do it, how to build floating cities so they can take over even more of the earth, avoid taxes, laws, whatever horrible shit happens behind the scenes so the rest of us can just go about our day oblivious how fucking gross the world is. And some people, they just want to...

Fuck, I don't even know. What I do know is that my company was tasked to check in on a group of C-steaders who hadn't been heard from for a while. The brief on it showed that a company that will go nameless set up their artificial island in a place that will also go nameless. This company had the money and the pull to keep it out of the news. That alone made me uneasy. Since when the big businesses spend big money on big projects

and not break about it, post about it, and generally pat themselves on the back about how smart they must be. Simple. When that thing they're doing is either something illegal, immoral, or just plain dangerous that could make Ocean Gate look like Gilligan's Island. We sign unusual forms, NDAs, and all that, so I can't get into much in the way of details here. So you can call bullshit on any of this if you want.

Makes no difference to me. I just need to get this off my chest. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. In my line of work, we see things. We see bad things. We see things that don't make any kind of sense no matter how you look at it. Mostly we work on the water,

responding to oil rigs and stuff like that. So this one was new to all of us. Military would have been better. But that would have meant potential congressional oversight. You call us when you don't want people to see what you did. we could pay damn good to forget what we see. But some things, you just can't forget. When we first boarded, it was the silence,

or as silent as the ocean really is. No radio transmissions, no one on the deck. I can't even really explain what I saw in a way that would make sense. It wasn't exactly water world out there. Then again, it wasn't exactly not either. There was a sort of shine and appearance to it that made me think of some new housing development where all the houses are right next to each other. They all look the same.

They're all big and shiny and new. But when you get inside, they're built like shit and still cost a fortune. But maybe that goes without saying on a huge man-made island floating in the middle of international waters. There is disrepair, for sure. Signs of damage and vandalism on walls. broken windows and stuff like that. No fires, though. That was good.

No signs of any gunfire. It was even better. Disconcerting. Reports were that there were over 200 people living on the complex. Place was big enough for five times that easy. I saw at least a half-dozen bunk houses that could have housed a hundred Marines and their gear. But I assumed it was like a cold open or something. Tested out with the most eager, or the dumbest.

They had big plans, big dreams, dreamers for sure. Fucking nightmare, though. I kept seeing flyers all over the place. Silly little propaganda leaflets tacked all around, like they were always trying to convince themselves of what they were doing was a good idea. Solve poverty, feed the hungry, cure the sick, clean the atmosphere, live in peace.

I can't speak to what they were able to accomplish with any of those first ones, but they sure as shit failed at the living in peace part. The first building my squad searched looked to be the mess hall, but only because of the general shape and layout of the tables. Besides that, though, there's just the beginning. The walls were filled with scribbling. At first I thought it was just random, them. But if you look closely, it was words written in a shaky hand or just shit handwriting.

Three main walls were filled with the writing, and I noticed there was some sort of rhyme or reason to it. They were numbered. Hundreds of them, like a to-do list or set of rules. It was a mix of what seemed like random thoughts and laws, etc. They were all out of order. Like number 176, thou shalt not kill. I personally feel that that one should be higher on the list, but maybe it wasn't an immediate concern. Number three was simple. If you open a door, close a door.

Some were mysterious, like number 52. Don't trust Lisa. Or number 17, don't let them out. It went on and on and on like that. No context, no real rhyme or reason. Just rambling. Senseless rules. It was disturbing, but not entirely unexpected.

I mean, we don't get called in for a broken radio. Something went wrong if we were there at all. It wasn't a stretch to think a person could go stir crazy out there. It was a fairly large place. But if you let the bad thoughts start to sneak in, or the feeling of being isolated or trapped, it's a steep drop into depression. My grandpa used to tell me stories about World War II, being on a battleship in the Pacific. He was at sea for over 14 months without setting foot on land. Couldn't even get him in a canoe after that.

He didn't even like going to the beach outside the occasional fish and he'd do from the dock. He just said he'd add enough water, even decades later. I understand that now. The second room we went to, one of the bunk houses, according to our intel, was a different matter entirely. If the mess hall was covered in the ramblings of someone who lost it, then the bunkhouse was something else. Like the mess hall, the walls, floor, and ceiling were covered again. Just not in graffiti. I was the second through the door and the first thing that my mind told me was that I was inside of a mouse.

I know it doesn't make any sense because it didn't make any sense. The heat, humidity, and dampness. Every surface was wet and shiny because everything was covered in blood and viscera. I have nothing I could compare it to in a way that would make any way that would make any. anyone who hadn't seen that room understand. All I could think of was that there was some kind of explosion. There's no damage that I could see to any part of the room. But it had been literally sprayed with human remains.

Maybe you've heard the term pink mist for someone getting shot in the head or an explosive device going off and turning the body into mist. Well, it was that. But it must have been at least ten people. worth. Unidentifiable remains of human bodies plastered to every surface. I don't know why, and I don't know how. I sure as fuck don't like to spend my free time trying to figure it out. I won't even get into the smell. I've smelt all kinds of decomposition, and even I had to focus on not lose my breakfast. A couple others weren't so lucky, heaving over the edge and feeding some

fish. Next were a series of interconnected buildings that we were told were used for engineering purposes. I figured it was a necessity living out there. That means something starts to break. You don't want to have to wait for someone to get helicoptered out there. You better at least be able to put together whatever version of a Band-Aid the rig needs. At least, that's how I think of it now. Back then, it was just more information at process and store from our briefing.

If they knew what was really going on in those buildings, they didn't tell us. And fuck them for not telling us if they had the chance. I'm not saying I would have passed on the assignment, but it would have helped me after the fact trying to process it all. It was like walking into a random office building and realizing you're in the middle of some fucked-up haunted house. I was never a great student,

but I came to appreciate basic concepts of math and physics. That stuff becomes real important when you might least suspect it. So I have a novice understanding of things like geometry and navigation. I can't sail a ship by the stars or anything, but I can get by in a jungle okay, which is probably more than I should share about myself. The point is, I kind of know how stuff is supposed to work in this world. So the last building I went into was a bit much to take in.

When I say that building didn't make sense, I mean it was like something dreamed up by a sci-fi writer. Objects literally floated in the air in front of us. At first, my squad took combat stances ready to engage targets before I realized those targets dancing off in the distance weren't survivors or bad guys. It was garbage. A Coke can, some paper, even a shoe. Just floating there in the middle of the room. room. There was some emergency floodlighting, but honestly, I just made things worse. I watched as a

computer in front of me turned on, then started to stretch, like pulling a piece of taffy from either side before snapping back into place. I saw walls ripple like flags in the wind. I saw the things that I can't even explain ways I would make any sort of impact, which seemed to be getting par for the course. But the worst was what was in the middle of the room. Whatever sorts of science, if you can even call it that, was happening out there. I have no idea what they were trying to do. If what I had already seen in the room wasn't enough, the dive pool was the breaking point.

In the middle of the room was a circle, about five meters across. I assume stuff like that was either used for divers or sea animals. Maybe they were training dolphins. But I didn't see any dolphins. I've dived before for reasons not important to this story. So trust me when I say that even the first second of looking into that pool screamed, walk away. First of all, if I didn't know what it was, I would have thought they'd built some sort of viewing station in the room

and that the dive pool was just a huge piece of glass. That's how clear it was. That's how smooth and frozen that water was. Surface tension like a fucking snare drum. There's absolutely no motion, which might have been possible under the right circumstances. If not for what I saw when I looked down in that pool. At first there was nothing.

Just a faint idea of water. Nothing worth staring at. So we started to move away, securing the room. Then we heard the splash. All weapons immediately trained in the dive pool again. All weapon lights on and locked on the exact same thing. A hand reaching up. out of the pool, fingers gripped to the edge.

The man on my right started to move toward the hand, but the squad leader told us to hold fast. I don't know what he might have known or what he saw from his point of view, but that decision probably saved that man's life. We held our positions, lights on the hand. Slowly, it released its grip on the ledge and just pointed straight up, like a kid asking a question in school. Then it grabbed the ledge again before walking along the ledge on its fingertips.

My dad used to do the same thing when I was little, calling his hand a spider to make us laugh when he put us to bed. Weird parallel to draw I know, but I'm grasping its draws here. The hand made an entire lap around the pool then paused again in the same position as we'd first seen it, gripping onto the ledge. And within a second, another hand shot up from the water, reaching up and gripping the edge next to it. If you weren't paying attention,

it might look like someone trying to pull themselves out of the pool, except that both of the hands were left hands. I can't say for certain because I'm pretty sure we all took a collective step backwards at that point. After maybe a minute, both hands released their grip and receded back into the water. No fucking way any of us were going to go and look into that pool. Not for what we got paid. We get paid real good.

The squad leader deployed a small hover drone and sent it over the pool. I was one of the people next to him at that point couldn't help but watch what he was seeing on the display screen. And it was enough to make me never want to be on. deep water again. At first there was nothing, just that glassy surface, not even a remaining ripple

from whatever it dipped back into the water. Nothing moving underneath it. Then, like stars appearing in an empty night sky, I saw him. I saw it. A hand, fingers spread like it was waving at us.

Then another, and another, and another five, ten, twenty hands more. They would raise and lower, fading into the darkness and appearing again. Then they started to roll around and we saw what the hands were attached to. It wasn't people, but you probably guessed that by now. From what I could make out each hand was the end of something I can only compare to a tentacle, but bigger than anything I'd seen.

Each one thicker than my waist. The hands and tentacles spiraled around like a snake pit, writhing and squirming against each other. Some actually looked like they were slapping others away. Then they all pulled back. All the while, the surface tension of the water never changed from mere quality. but there was something else, something rigid, coarse. And it hit me. The words creeping out past my lips.

It's a fucking eye. The moment I sat it, the giant lid, as large around as a dive pool opening, stared directly up at the drone. And in that moment, the drone fell out of the sky and into the water. We didn't hear the splash And the squad leader yelled for us to clear the room The moment we were all outside We called for a Hilo extract

We came by rating rap But there was no goddamn way you were getting any of us back into it I didn't see it myself But as a Hilo took off People claimed that they saw something swimming under the rig Something big Something so big it couldn't have been real It had to have been a strange reflection of light

off the water. Exhausted minds trying to wrap themselves around what they'd just seen. We debriefed and that was it. Never heard another word about it. I can't tell you what was out there. I can't tell you what happened to those people. All I know is that you'll never get me on the water again. Not a cruise, not a fucking canoe in a pond.

I finally understood Grandpa, and now every night I dream about hands. Hands reaching for me, hands grabbing for me, trying to pull me down, down, down into the darkness. Toward something worse than anything we know to be true. Something that was supposed to only be a bad dream. A nightmare come true. waiting waiting Okay, it looks like we aren't having much luck with

Instead let's take an opportunity to run another The following infomercial was captured and recorded At 3.15 a.m. on Channel 9 in Minneapolis, Minnesota On October 25th, 1989 This recording was found in a box of VHS tapes With the date, channel, and time written on the label on the side of the tape Neither the owner of the garage sale it was purchased from nor the television station itself have any recollection of the commercial.

Has this ever happened to you? We here at the Institute for Psychic Recovery are sensitive to the needs of your family and loved ones, stricken with any number of the numerous forms of extrasensory perception. We know that neither you nor they ask for this, and we understand. Here at IPR, we employ the most state of the state of the same. the art learnings and technologies to help overcome the often crippling side effects that come with the seemingly random instances of psychic abilities. Take Janice here. She's been with us for over three years now. Hello, Doctor. When Janice first came to us, she was near catatonic

due to what we later diagnosed as an untreated case of precognition. In short, Janus can see the future. While we haven't been able to fully understand the lengths and limits of her We have been able to get wonderful results with our group and talk therapies. Doctor, a war is coming. So many wars. And no one will care. One of the most difficult things in cases like Janice's is parsing the times when she is actually seeing the future, with the times her mind is struggling not to tear itself apart and is fabricating an inconceivable

reality to cope. No one will look up, always looking down, living through others, hating those same people. Our best estimates are that, while we do believe that Janice can see the future on occasion, such events are rare. More often than not, her visions, as she puts it, are of an impossible and fantastical society so devoid of empathy and understanding that it seems the world is constantly teetering on the brink of tearing itself apart. She is very creative, a standout in our art therapy groups. And you will die, doctor?

Yes, Janice, death is a part of life. They will find you in a basement surrounded by the pictures. So many pictures of... Ha ha ha ha. Oh, Janice, such an imagination. Here at IPR, we cover the gamut of psychic powers. Do you or any of your loved ones suffer from any of the following? Astral or mental projection.

Automatic writing. Bilocation. Cryokinesis. Ergokinesis. Hydrokinesis. Invisibility. Levitation. Materialization.

Mediumship or channeling. mind control, phytokinesis, precognition, post-cognition, psychic surgery, pyrokinesis, remote viewing, or something else. Our experience staff utilizes the most state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques and equipment to determine if your loved one does indeed possess some level of extrasensory perception. Or if their behavior is a result of more, let's say run-of-the-mill challenges. You see, advances in the field of ESP diagnosis and treatment are progressing more and more all the time. Since the early days of our research, all the way back in 1953, through that iteration's completion in 1964, we were able to learn so much about human psychology and the limits of the normal human brain that we've been able to use those results to create a baseline understanding of mental capabilities.

So, the real question is, why go with a choice like IPR? Well, I think it's safe to say that if you are already familiar with some of what I've said, that you've most likely already been approached, most likely in your home. Does this scenario seem familiar to you? It's the middle of the afternoon. You're sitting in your living room. The television is on. Your favorite soap opera is playing, but you don't hear what they're saying.

Your mind is occupied with thoughts like, What has my life become? And, what am I going to do? Suddenly, there's a knock at your door. Odd, you aren't expecting visitors, and your husband won't be home from work for hours. Could it be a delivery man? You check your makeup and hair in the hallway mirror quickly to ensure your appearance isn't one of total distress before going to the door.

The moment you open the door, you realize that it isn't the delivery man. In fact, it's two men, men in black suits and hats. Their skin is pale. Perhaps they're from a Nordic country. That would explain the strange manner that they speak. Their sentences are slightly broken, but you understand the world. you understand the context. Naturally, you are confused and concerned. These men have offered no form of identification. Could they be police officers? Ha, ha, ha, I think not. Instead of credentials

of any sort, they hand you a business card with a phone number on it. They tell you that they know exactly what you're going through, and that they are there to help. As strange as the scenario was, it felt good, didn't it? Finally, someone was offering to help. When your family, friends, and neighbors have all turned a blind eye to the pain that has been happening around you, the strangeness that seems to follow you and your loved ones. Now, there are two men at your door you've never met before, from an agency they never name, saying they can help you. And you want to.

More than anything you want to, don't you? There's only so much you can take. You aren't a professional. This isn't what you've signed up for. And just like that, your mind begins to rationalize at all. They must be able to help. Why else would they be there? How else would they know the details of what's been happening?

They don't seem scared or concerned. They aren't rolling their eyes like the doctors did, like the police did. So you take the card and thank them. They stand in the doorway, staring at you until you close the door. You don't hear or see them leave, but they are gone. You stare at that card for the rest of the afternoon. You barely have time to get dinner ready for your husband after his long day at work trying to provide for the family. All he wants is a hot meal before being overwhelmed by the life he didn't sign up for either.

The things that happen at night, especially when they dream. You don't sleep. You stare at that card. You memorize the number. You don't even have to think about it the next morning after your husband leaves for work early. You pick up the phone and dial the phone. the number without so much as a thought to what is going on, but the phone doesn't ring. There is just a click in what sounds like breathing, so you say hello, but there is no response.

Then another click, and a voice similar to the man at the door answers, saying hello to you by name and asking when you'd like them to come by to care for your loved one. Now, if you're still watching this, I think we both know that you didn't tell them anything. You hung up. Something seemed off. Something wasn't right. But what other options did you have? Of course, there's always one option. But you couldn't do that. You shouldn't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Instead, please call the number on your screen to schedule an assessment by our accredited and courteous staff. We understand your pain. Dare I say, we feel it too. If you're ready to make a change, call the Institute for Psychic Recovery now. We can help. No longer affiliated with the Department of Defense or Subproject 68. You're listening to KREP, today, tomorrow.

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, YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative comments 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.