Creepy - Day 17 - The Mall Closed at 9 & Little Candy Bags

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

The Mall Closed at 9***Written by: James Wieners and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Little Candy Bags***Written by: Joe Woodin***Content warning: Poison, Planned Child Harm***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.

Creepy presents the 31 days of horror. Day 17. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastors and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language.

Listener discretion is advised. Hello, Nate. It's lovely to see you again. How have you been? Pretty good. Looking forward to getting back home to Chicago. The food? It's not great here. I'm sorry to hear that. What are you looking forward to having again? Oh, man. Take your pick. And of course, the pizza, which is really more of a casserole than a pizza. Or the hot dogs with so much garnish on them that you can't actually taste the hot dog,

but damn anyone who would dare use ketchup. And of course, malort. Sorry, threw up in my mouth a little there. I see. And was there a dream you wanted to talk about? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had this dream last night that really stuck. with me called the Mall closed at 9.

The Mall closed at 9. We're a small town. If kids want to stay up later than that, they have to do it at home. I used to work the latest shift, did the closing and all that. I've never minded kids much, and walking home alone at night wasn't too bad. We're a small town. The mall is the last thing to close down. I felt safe.

Still do, most of the time. It usually took me an hour to do everything for closing. My favorite hour of the night. Alone in the space, pulling down the grate and locking it for the night, I was the only employee of my status with the keys. Our general manager had the other set. She closed up on my days off. What I liked about that hour didn't have as much to do with loneliness,

but more to do with the bond I formed with our little space there. I became a part of the mall, just as much as the outlet shoe store and the kiosks down the way. As much as I loved it, I was just working there until I could pay off my car loans and rent with my only day job. It came as a surprise then when I was promoted to manager. One hot, sweaty October evening, the owner plopped a set of keys in my palm

and gave me the news of my promotion. Our general manager had died. No one told me anything. I didn't even know that it happened in the mall until I overheard my co-workers. The coworker I liked the least got my old keys. It had to be someone. I couldn't close every night no matter how much I wanted to.

The mall rat kids liked me more after that. I'd let them hang around when I could, but I didn't have much power. Now, they could sit around and do whatever it is teenagers do. Working myself to the bone, closing most nights, walking home alone and in the dark, I lost days. The kids started staying until I told them to go. We weren't friends.

I wouldn't call it that. They always did what I asked of them, throwing away trash and thanking me when they left. I began a terrible habit of swinging my keys back and forth, wrapping the ring of silver around my hand and letting it fall back. Originally, it started up with my own ring of keys, but it got worse with my manager's keys. They felt too heavy in my hand, always leaving small white scratches on my skin. They weren't deep and they never hurt, but it scared me every time. looking down at my hands in her eyes.

That's what it felt like. Like my dead manager, Hannah, was looking through my eyes at her own body, standing behind the register, empty tables wiped clean, stale gum in my mouth. These were her hands, too. The blood began a couple of months later. People cut themselves in the back all the time.

To be honest, I didn't think anything of it at first. None of the staff complained. The kids did. They complained a lot. They asked if I was okay. One time I came out into the front with blood dripping from my left hand. No cuts.

It was just there. For a long time, I could have sworn it was dripping from the ceiling. We would have felt a drip if it was, cold and thick over our arms and face, working behind the counter. Maybe the kids were more observant than me. Maybe I was just overworked and had neglected to notice a leak in some pipe that produced a copper-toned liquid. Almost a year later, I noticed myself chewing on the inside of my cheek and picking at acne scabs. It wasn't something noticeable, only when it got to the point where I would bleed. That was when I stopped trying to figure out where all the blood came from. I just decided that it had always been from a habit I picked up

weeks after it started. The kids made their same jokes. One of them commented on my face, said she swore I used to have a nose ring. Hannah had. She was covered in piercings, though. It was an odd thing to say. Looking back, I can't tell if she even realized how much that bugged me after the fact. I was in the shower, two days after she said that. I can remember it because I over slept on both days. My hair started falling out. I may have started sooner, but I hadn't noticed until I pulled a tangled clump from my head. I started tying it up after that, which didn't help much and culminated in shaving my head halfway through the summer. The kids liked it. They thought I was cool. It worsened all of the comparisons

to Hannah. My co-workers would accidentally call me by her name, and after a while, they stopped correcting themselves. I didn't take it personally. It was one night at the end of the summer. I was closing, and I felt it. Locking up, we always have to pull the gate down, and I hadn't urged to shove my head under it.

I wanted to be inside. Roughly a week later, I clocked myself for a little. closing and an opening back to back. I stayed the night and opened the next morning. No one noticed. I hadn't known Hannah all that well. That's why I wasn't too freaked out by her death. Yes, I was generally irritable for a couple days,

but it was overshadowed by the workload I had for college at the time. I felt bad about that in retrospect, but I didn't have time back then to address my emotions. I didn't go to the funeral. I just forgot about her. But the kids' comments and my co-workers mixing up our names, it was hard to completely let go. As I spent night after night working by the light of my computer in the empty mall,

I worked through what must have happened. She didn't fall all over the banister. That was a common one. Janice, another co-worker, believed that. Allison thought it was suicide. I quickly ruled that out as well. According to Ryan, she had worked on a mental health campaign for the kids at the small church in town. I used to know more about it, but essentially, it's a church based on their own conceptual understanding of all major religious texts.

She was a leader there. They're the type to put pamphlets in every car door and under every welcome mat in town. essentially she would know who to go to if she was going through something. Maybe it was what Ryan thought, which was dumb in every way, but just crazy enough to be the truth. Murder. And that had left the puddle because all they found was a puddle. That was how we knew it had been inside the mall, a small puddle of blood. Someone called it in the next morning.

when my coworkers came in for their shift, they couldn't get in. The grate was up, but everything else was locked. It was a long investigation. They kept coming back to interview me all throughout that first summer. I did whatever they wanted. I don't like cops, but I was terrified that if I didn't do exactly what they said, they'd find me guilty of something. They didn't ask for much, just who I was,

what I did, how I knew her, all that kind of thing. I was always more than happy to see them out, because for the first two times, I had the answer. I knew who I was, and I knew Hannah. The lines became blurred after the third time. She was my manager for as long as I could remember, and then I took her place, and I had no more relation to her.

They kept asking about my new look, about how the store had remained unchanged. I took deep breaths and told them they weren't welcome back, especially seeing as it had been over a year at this point since her death. No one really cared to see her case solved. My nights grew longer and longer as the days got colder. When fall began, my hair was still short and my arms were scar. scabbed with unheeled scars. The last night I planned on spending there, the kids wouldn't leave.

I was trying to close up, but they kept asking questions and it just wasn't worth it. So I went home, walking along that dark road, and the kids scattered around the town, finding other places to be. The mall closed at nine. Most of their curfews were past ten that had something to do with. the freedoms of their laws of service, some church thing. I saw them skating around in the yellow light of the street lamps and then they were gone. There's a part of me that didn't know where to go past Appleway. I stopped at the crosswalk and waited. I didn't know how to get home.

Darkness pushed in, old street lamps flashing yellow and white stripes across the street. A deep breath. and more silence. My feet parted around town, carrying me past the closed supermarket and empty coffee shop. When I finally found my apartment, I noted that my key barely fit the lock anymore. My left arm was covered in spindly white scars, barely scabbed over. I fell on my bed and slept soundly for the first time in what must have been months. I woke up with Hannah's keychain down my throat. It wasn't scary. I just reached my mouth with a couple fingers and pried them out one by one.

Bloody, slimy, steel chains clipped my teeth. The ring with the key themselves was more difficult, taking them minutes and an audience with my mirror. I chipped one of my molars and cut a gash so deep on the inside of my left cheek that I could see the remnants of it on the outside when I saw. smiled. Leaving my room, my roommate nodded and left for his night shift. My tongue was dry with a tang of metal. All of my meals tasted the same. Talking began to hurt. I stopped staying the night at the shop after that. Something inside of me realized that I needed to disconnect myself. The kids

started hanging around with baseball bats. And I didn't say anything. I was the cool manager that let them get away with things like this. And they listened to me. They worried for me. They all asked about the scabs, brought in creams, all sorts of ways to show they cared. I let them hang around even when business got worse. The police came around again and they seemed so suspicious of me.

They wanted to look around. Naively, I let them. and they didn't find anything. That was the last time they came in. I told them they weren't welcomed back in my establishment. I let the kids practice knife tricks later, purely out of spite. One of the older kids, a girl, started staying until I closed up. She carried a bat with pink and purple hearts painted on the end.

There was a nail hammered directly into the tip, sticking out just the slightest bit so as not to be noticeable at first glance. Her hair was rough and teased. I didn't say anything about it. I never really said anything at that point. We walked out of the mall every night together. Then they closed the university. And I stayed the night at the mall.

I ignored the protests from the girl and the other teens she had called to convince the university. me otherwise. If college was for nothing, I wouldn't get the day job I needed outside of this. They took all my credits down with them into that simmering pot of bankruptcy and bureaucratic nonsense. I'd have to go home if this didn't work out, and it didn't. A shaking mess on the ground with a great shut up and locked, mall-rat kids on the other side sitting and staring at me until their curfew. The mall closed long before they left. We didn't have a real security guard back then. Such a small town didn't need a security guard when they had cameras. I got away with a lot more than I should have. They didn't seem to understand that cameras are only good if you hire someone

to constantly be watching them. They should have figured out what happened to Hannah. If they had the cameras, they should have looked at the clips from that night. The blood was right outside the shop. There was a camera facing our entrance. It made no sense. I needed to see the clips. I snuck into the back room after the kids had gone. Behind the pretzel stands and the movie theater, there's one long hallway leading two places. Firstly, outside. And secondly, the conveniently unlocked security room. In the clutter of an unsupervised, non-existent security position, it took a while to figure out their labeling method.

In a box towards the back of the room, I found that night on tape. It was shaded and grainy, but it was there. Hannah stood outside the grate, waiting for something. Same glimmer in her eye that I had by the Appleway Cross. I saw it as she glanced at the camera, snapping her head back to the store almost immediately. And then she flipped her keys around in her hand, pressing the skeleton key up to her wrist and letting it settle there. The next hour was nothing but silence and her standing.

Then, slowly, she used her right hand to begin carving thin lines with the smallest key, the one to the cash drawer. They were just white lines at first, leaving the skin unbroken. Quickly they turned, blood pouring from her arm where it pooled on the ground. She adopted a new method, staring down at the puddle. She started carving the key just under the topmost layers of her skin, exposing new layers of thin and red-tinted insides. It didn't bleed after.

after that. She did this until her entire left side was mangled and hanging off her frame. She looked back up at the camera and the feed flickered out. I flipped to later on in the night. There she was, lying on the ground, the puddle of blood slowly drying. She had abandoned her clothes neatly, folded them to the side with the key sitting on top like a flourish. Her unmoving body was mostly skinned and bruised in odd purple. The group of kids I saw every day walked slowly into frame and poked her with a decorated baseball bat.

She startled and ran, which took her much longer in her state. She was barely at a walking speed, stumbling and flailing through each step forward. The kids began to trifle through her stuff. Not a single one of them touched the keys. Her skin hung like a film, over her entire body, an exoskeleton. And then she was out of the shot, but I didn't bother

looking for the other camera angles. I grabbed my coat and sat outside the mall, flipping my keys around until morning. The kid skipped school a lot. I knew when they did, and that morning, I knew they would. The mall opened at 9. I unlocked the grate and watched as they piled inside. I didn't say a word as they smashed the glass on one of the showcase cabinets. I don't know much of what happened after that. I went into autopilot. One of them caught a chair on fire. I placed the keys gently on top of it, feeling vaguely like I was misplacing something.

And somehow I got out. No one was hurt. I was on the news for three weeks. There was nothing. The next month, November, I sent in my resignation and condolences. The cops never came to question me. My hair has gotten longer. The scabs have healed with time.

The scars are still there. I can't bring myself to try any of those special creams. I don't know if I want to get rid of them. The city refuses to clean the burnt out portion of the mall. They said it was. something about structural integrity and worker safety. They've tried to pretend like it isn't there. It's been plastered over with drywall and plastic sheets, but I know.

Our keys are still sitting in the center of the room, covered in ashes. She hasn't come back for them yet. Wow, Nate, that was certainly filled with a lot of interesting imagery. Yeah. It's kind of been mess with. with me. What do you think it means? Well, there's a lot there to unpack. The dream could reflect the struggle with identity and inheritance, the fear of becoming someone else, or by being consumed by an unwanted role. The mall could be the stage of the self, Hannah, the unacknowledged shadow,

and the keys could be the weight of power or trauma passed down. The dream ends with an attempted release, but the unresolved presence of the keys shows the dream still feels haunted, tethered to the shadows. Does any of this ring true for you? Whoa, you really got all that from my dream? As I said, there's a lot there. Anything else? Sure. The mall could represent your inner self, a space once full of a space.

life but now closing down, acknowledging where you are in life. The appearing without wounds may reflect leaking emotional pain or unprocessed trauma. The teens as witnesses may represent your younger self witnessing your own decline. So it was a super happy, uplifting dream that I should feel good about. Gotcha. Awesome. Not at all. Remember that dreams rarely predict, they process. They're your psyche's way of staging a play, of exaggerating what you're afraid of so you can see it clearly. And don't forget, in the dream, you walk away, you survive. That's significant.

It means that deep down, your own unconscious knows you're still capable of leaving the people, pain behind. Oh, well, that's better. Thanks, Doc. My pleasure. I hope it helped. And I'll see what I can do about getting the cafeteria to serve some casserole. That's not really what I'm...

What the hell is that? ...and press play. Who are you? Please take the recorder and press play. They know you will tell them your dream. Please don't resist. The only way out of here is to cooperate. Don't worry, they're here to help.

But they must take precautions because of your... Temper. Your dreams hold the answer to your memory. Trust the voice you are hearing right now. They are here to help. Don't resist. My temper. What?

What's going on here? They know you will tell them your dream. Please don't resist. The only way out of here is to cooperate. Don't worry. they're here to help, but they must take precautions because of your temper. Your dreams hold the answer to your memory. Trust the voice you are hearing right now.

They are here to help. My dream? How's my dream going to help anything? How's me telling you about the little candy bags going to help me? Robbie was 44 in waning. A sad affair for a man who had been oh so lucky. He had a stay-at-home job, a comfortable living, and a free house inherited from a long-dead aunt he was barely close to. His folks were solid people, and always ready to lend a hand when the time arose.

And he always held a tight-knit group of friends who wouldn't leave if he threatened them, too. But there was one area he failed, one avenue that remained uncharted for him. Family life. There were girlfriends, sure, even if you cut off engagements. The problem wasn't that he was ugly or obnoxious. He just asked too much and gave too little. He expected the world from any woman who walked into his life. And very soon after meeting them, the ego would begin to emerge.

The bitterness and deep-seated hatred he had for everyone in his life. The curses he made him private about how easy everyone played their decks with few cards to play with. He knew his parents lay awake at night, just wondering why their pride. prodigal son couldn't piece his life together with all the parts he'd been given. Control was what he wanted. But control he could never get, and so he stued and dreamt. And finally, one September day, he laid his plans out perfectly. For the past few years, he created a special tradition for his part of town.

Late at night on September 30th, he'd begin decorating the house with all the bells and whistles of the Halloween spirit. Zombies in the front lawn arose to scare guests, paper jackal lanterns that dangled high along the large oak trees in his lawn, and all of the other new equipment he procured each fall. His schick was the only game in town, and probably in the state. It was trick-or-treat every day of the month and a final extravagance on the big day. It started as a way to live vicariously through the parents and families on his street. They'd come by with their cute little children. all dressed up and everything from store-bought masks to home-brewd outfits.

It gave him a taste of what he was missing, and for years it put water on whatever fire he had crackling inside. But it all came crashing down on October 2nd when he saw Lucille and her kids. Lucille was a past fling of 14 years back. In her own memory, nothing more than a troublesome rough patch. But Robbie had seen a whole future in her. the same dream he pushed on every woman he'd ever known. She was 26 then, and nowhere near the life that Robbie first saw.

And after six months, she called it quits. They met up at a local bar called Rockies, and she did her best to play damage control. He flew off the handle, cursing her out and sobbing like they were the only two in the world. She got up after a few minutes of his pathetic cries and yelps. The bartender Frank had been a high school buddy of Robbie's, and tried to console him, though his face ultimately failed to hide his own disgust. And now, over a decade later, there she was, all smiles and walking confidently with her two

little brats in step. Of course, Robbie played it nice. He asked shallow, get long questions about how things were going. Lucille answered in her kindly way and left with a sweet goodbye. Her two little angels toddled away ecstatic at their overflowing bags of candy. It was in that brief moment of their departure that he began planning to get even, with not only Lucille, but also all the other parents. On October 3rd through the 5th, he drove to a town over and began picking up supplies, starting with a pharmacy and then a hardware store. And with each candy bar he rewrapped, the hard candy he melted down and reformed, it began to feel like this had been his plan from the start. It took him many long nights to many months to many. manufacture as perfect poison treats.

These candies would have to wait for the big day. If the candy was handed out before the 31st, all fingers would point to him. No, this had to happen on the day when everyone was handing out candy, the day when no one could be sure. So from the 10th until the 30th, every candy that rolled out into the street was clean and untouched. Interactions were just like they used to be, but now his boiling hate was. harder to hide. It was tempting to experiment, but he knew the risk too. And why wouldn't they work? He knew what he was doing, and now he just had to bite his time until that red-letter

day. So as the weeks drew on, he fell out of his work. Reports stopped being submitted, and calls from the office grew angrier. But Robbie was in the throes of obsession, just waiting for his golden hour. He barely slept or ate the week. of the big day. Nights were spent preparing his own costume like he always did. This year, with his thoughts all entangled, he chose a cheap route, a simple vampire, nothing more, nothing less. He had spare teeth in a closet upstairs, and a cloak which he draped over a white button up in black work slacks. Thursday night he swallowed down some full power sleeping pills to make sure he was well rested, but nothing seemed to work.

On Halloween morning, he emerged from his room and began preparations without any sleep and a burning hunger he was too busy to feed. Puttering through the lawn, he placed out more decorations. Gravestones were dotted along his stone path, and a witch was placed under the lit porch. Time flew by like he thought it never would. And soon his tall, pale figure rolled out

the large plastic cauldrons overstuffed, with the poisoned treats. Kids began to arrive in small groups. Someone attended and others with parents at their stead. The costumes this year had been marvelous. If it had been a year prior, it would have been all he noticed. But now his eyes were keenly fixed, staring at each child as they sang,

Trick or treat, and watching as they grabbed in shoveled handfuls and then bagfuls of candy. Soon both cauldrons were empty, and it hadn't even reached seven. yet. He began to make routes in and out of the house, where he supplying the dwindling piles of candy, and with each venture in and then out, another group of children would appear, each larger than the others. The pain began at eight. There were sharp jolting shocks throughout his arms, as if beneath his skin tiny nails were beginning to protrude, but he kept on moving, handing out tons and tons of

candy. The pain spread to other parts. His lungs and his head began to suffer further. His eyes managed to stay open as he glared through the crowd, praying that he would see his favorite family, but they never arrived. It was odd. None of the children were recognizable, and their darting eyes beneath their plastic masks seemed to taunt him as he ran in and out, releasing loud, wheezing breaths. The children were ravenous, always begging for more and more, tearing and screaming to get on to the tiny porch. At 11 o'clock, the crowds weren't letting up. Shouldn't they be home by now? His head had begun to pound with every step he took.

The sweat poured from his body so much that the floor ran slick. And then the hunger, that enormous hunger which fell like the walls of his stomach were collapsed. lapsing in on themselves. He stared longingly now at the candy in the cauldrons, all scattered around in savory sweet selections of red and orange packaging. Maybe he could have just one, he told himself, just one to cure this devilish urge to consume. No, he muttered to himself hysterically.

Not until all the little demons were gone. Then he could eat. Eat and listen patiently for the screams of terror as family's lives. They lost themselves, but there was no letting up, and the children got mean. They were all screeching now and hurting around the house like a pack of wild hyenas. Robbie locked all the doors at one o'clock and dragged one of the cauldrons into the living room. They were clawing at the windows now, and the taste of copper was in his mouth. Lying on the couch, he began to shoot thick, flummy blood from his mouth.

But it did the opposite of quelling his appetite. It was impossible now to stop. With bloated hands, he dug into the cauldron, swallowing candy bar after candy bar, plastic and chocolate mashed between his teeth, and it went down so easily. One after another, all of them were heavenly to his taste buds. A group of children had made it into the basement from the garden by then, smashing the locks with their tiny fists. When one of the herd discovered the new entrance,

the rest followed suit and wave after wave, they felt. flooded into the living room. Robbie lay in a mess of gluttony, washing down in candy with the blood that still pooled in his mouth, and as he feasted, the children did as well. They picked and prodded at him, pulling his costume off first and ripping the cloth into shred so all the children could profit. And once the costume was divided, they began to grab hair and pry fingernails. Robbie only stopped eating when there were no fingers to pick candies.

The children cackled now and Robbie felt fear, but he just couldn't stop eating. The children tore off limbs, passing them along in the crowd like ants would carry food. It wasn't very much longer until the entirety of Robbie was carted off in orange and black candy bags. Can someone please it? explain that to me? I don't even understand it. Why does it feel so real? I'd never hurt children. I have, I mean, I think I don't know what's going on. And return both items to the window. We are here to help. It's okay. It's okay. I know this is all really confusing and I'm confused too,

but they are here to help us. They want answers just like you do, like I do. They think the answers lie in your dreams. Please share your dream from last night. I know it doesn't make any sense. Just tell them. They are here to help. Is...

Is it true? Are you really here to help me? Hello? Is anyone there? 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 common 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 story's author.