Creepy - Day 19 - Trick or Trick & Down We Go

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Trick or Trick***Written by: Paul Caseley***Down We Go***Written by: Aleksandra Kon and Narrated by: Megan McDuffee***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound Design by Pacific Obadiah***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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

Creepy present. The 31 Days of Horror. Day 19. Trick or trick. Written by Paul Casley. My name's Landon Fortin. And I'm a realtor who specializes in properties that have bad reputations. I've dealt with a number of supernatural and just

plain strange things over the years and current situation nowwithstanding, things generally come out all right. There are a few rules I live by. First, assemble your experts and rule out the mundane first. Most of the time what people think are hauntings or evil spirits are actually electrical problems or a draft through an attic window. Second, keep an open mind, especially when listening to less conventional experts. I keep an exorcist and a psychic on retainer for a reason.

Finally, never, ever dress up a house for Halloween. The homesite lists get shuttered and shut down during that spooky season. Really, the houses don't need any help in a creep-out factor, and no one in the neighborhood needs to be reminded of the house's dubious reputation. Besides, I hate Halloween. Hell, I hate October. You know those people who start to start to be a lot of Halloween. dressing up the house in September for Halloween and go with a full steam for the big night,

they're people who have never in their lives experienced a real evil infestation. They think it's all fun in games because it isn't real. They also think that their activities are all in good fun. Sam Ayn, what most people refer to as the Halloween season, is a time when the barriers between the worlds are the living and the dead thin, allowing the AOC, our spirits and fairies, to enter our world more easily. People would leave offerings of food and drink at their door to appease these spirits lest they turn nasty towards them.

The masks were a modern invention, explained as trying to hide in plain sight. It's mostly Balder Dash. We now have kids representing the AOC and candy the offerings. The only problem is that the barrier is still weak and thin during that night. If you're in possession of a house that's truly being used. attack by supernatural beings. This is the worst possible time to dress up and potentially invite more. As a result, my hard and fast rule for any house I'm selling in October is no decorations, no lights on to attract trick-or-treaters, absolutely nothing to rock the boat.

These behaviors could cause problems in a neighborhood if the house already has a dubious reputation, or if it's genuinely the haunt of something from another realm, it could make things more. much worse. I often wish I could do something to keep other people in the neighborhoods I'm working from full-scale celebrations. But it's hard to justify, and let me be honest, most of the time it really is fine. I'm not going to be the Grinch who canceled Halloween. Most people also never actually deviate from superhero costumes or zombies enough to really

piss anything off. Most of them also don't truck in dark magic or even try to. Well, unless you're people living around a classic Georgian home in London's Old North that's rumored to be haunted by the original owners of the house. I first got a call because I'd better have a look at the property that I was working to list two days before Halloween. I should tell you that when someone from your firm calls you up and tells you that you better have a look, it's never a good thing. It's never that people are lined up around the block to put bids on the beautiful house. or to tour it or anything remotely positive. You can always expect there to be storm damage

or some idiot who drunkenly drove through the front window with her car, something having to do with vandalism. The first thing I noticed as I rounded the corner was the entire street was festooned with the gaudiest and showiest of Halloween crap. If you could get it at one of those pop-up Halloween stores, it was in someone's front yard. There were giant ghosts, giant skeletons,

those weird blow-up things that must be murder on a monthly electrical bill. Basically, I was looking at the Griswold's Halloween spread over a dozen houses. This crazy neighborhood took Halloween seriously. And it seemed that they were a bit annoyed that the empty house that I was intent on selling wasn't decorated like theirs. In fact, they decided that seeing as it was empty, they decorated it for me. I pulled up to the house and had a look for myself at their handiwork.

For the most part, it was a regular stuff they'd see on yards. I quickly got the feeling that the neighbors have pooled some of their own decorations to make the house fit in to their macabre display. They created a graveyard in the front of the house, complete with plastic skeleton, the people, pets, and other monsters and animals. I noticed that they'd also installed lights and smoke machines around the place, so at night it probably would be quite an engaging display. I passed through the exhibit thinking that maybe this once I could let it go.

After all, they'd put a lot of work into it and wouldn't be up for long. I really didn't want to create bad blood in the neighborhood, and what I was seeing was harmless. Until I saw them. Two of the grave markers bore the names of the original homeowners, and above the graves, hanging from a tree, were two plastic skeletons. This was not only in bad taste, but potentially problematic if the spirits did indeed inhabit the house. The Blackwells had the house built around 1948, and lived in it pretty harmoniously, for about five years.

He'd worked for the government in a fairly distinguished career as a diplomat and had retired to their dream home in London, Ontario's old Norris. From there, no one's really sure what happened in the Georgian home. Some people say that they never saw

any signs of trouble between the couple. Others say it was too quiet and they became reclusive. In fact, even the deaths were never solved anyone's satisfaction. Some people said it was a suicide pact. Others stated it was a murder suicide. How we know is that the couple were found hanging side by side from the very tree that

these plastic skeletons now dangled. Probably the neighbors thought they were taking ownership of the houses and therefore neighborhoods, macabre history, to others it might seem like nastiness verging on mocking. If the spirits of the black wolves really did inhabit the house, there was little doubt that they were going to be pissed. This was not a tasteful display, and it wasn't staying. up. With that in mind, I started taking it down, hoping it wasn't too late. I'd like to say that I felt bad about removing all the work the neighbors did to decorate the property for Halloween, but I didn't. I never understood what people were thinking when it comes to real estate. Already this house was going to sell probably between $50,000 and $100,000 below market value due to

its history and situation. If they rubbed a potential seller's face in the fact that there was a suicide house, or worse, a murder suicide house, the price was going to fall even lower. This isn't just to affect my bottom line. It also affects the value of all the houses and proximity to it. This is exactly what I explained to one of the helpful neighbors who came to tell me off when I was taking down their idiocy. I also told them how incredibly horrible their choice of decoration was in terms of taste when dealing with the blackwells. The total revulsion that should have impacted him when told about how disgusting the idea of mocking the deaths of two real people was, didn't.

The prospect of destroying his own property values did. As he wandered away muttering to himself with his head down, I thought again about how far common decency seemed to have fallen and finished cleaning up. Finally, after commending myself on a job well done, I put the decorations, now firmly ensconced in a trash bag, on the curb before going to my office. The rest of the day passed fairly uneventfully. I mean, most of what I do is men listings, go over contracts and the like.

The job isn't as exciting as they make you look on television. But then what job actually is. I actually had a good deal of work to do on the Kennington property as I just closed that sale. As a result, I went over contracts, dispersals, and all the good stuff the men I got paid. At some point I lost track of time and looked up to find it dark. That wasn't a huge surprise. It was autumn and the sun starts setting early. It was well after 6 o'clock, and I decided to finish up and go home.

I also decided that maybe I should swing by the Blackwell estate on my way, just to make sure that no one else got up in any shenanigans. It was only seconds of driving to remember that I was driving on all Hallows Eve. The smallest of children were already starting to stream into the sidewalks and began crossing the road with wary-looking parents who were doing their best to enjoy this rite of passage. For my part, as a driver. I reduced my speed and tried to stay especially vigilant.

There was always a chance of a child darting away from parents and into the road, and believe it or not, I have also seen more than one very tired parent wander into the road without looking. Finally, I made my way to the house and felt an immediate surge of anger flood through my every pore. The porch light was on. The house was lit up. The decorations were back up. Children were headed up the walkway. I found myself wondering which asshole neighbor had a key and had illegally entered the house to host trick-or-treaters.

I sat in my car, fuming, trying to decide between calling the police and kicking some ass myself when I started to notice something. Children and parents walked up the walkway to the porch. But they didn't come back out. My mind started to whirl with possibilities. None of them particularly good. Of course, the mundane was always possible, and Mr. and Mrs. Crazy might have taken up residence in the house and started offing kids and parents for fun. Wouldn't have been the first time that some dangerous squatter took up residence in a house for sale.

Even more frightening was a distinct possibility that the Blackwoods were still inhabiting the house and result angered by the display earlier that they decided on some kind of retribution. One way or another, people were in danger. Momentarily, I thought about calling the police, but then wondered what the hell I would say. Hello, police? There's this house that kids and parents are going into and aren't coming out of. It's supposed to be empty. I think evil spirits might be eating them,

or maybe a serial killer set up shop in there. What? No, no screams or panic. They just don't come back out again. Could it be a party? Well, it is supposed to be empty. Yeah, that would work. And I'm sure that the police,

who are inundated with pranks on this night, and who are having one of their busiest nights would just come running. I knew that the best thing to do would probably be have a look for myself. I didn't really want to go in, and didn't know what I would do if I had to deal with it. But what else could I do? Nothing? Well, I suppose I could do nothing.

Then what kind of a person would I be? More annoyed than anything else. I joined a line along the walkway to the house. I had to see what I was dealing with first. I thought about calling some of my team, but they weren't on 24-hour retainer. To work with people, you have to have boundaries. I would try to handle this myself first, and then, failing that, I would get some of the others involved. The queue moved fairly quickly, and I soon found myself in front of the line where I was roughly grabbed, pulled into the house,

and then thrown into what had once been in office or done. The room was dark, and had the odd odor of sulfur around it. More than odiferous, the room was cacophonous. filled with the sounds of crying children and adults, either trying to keep their children calm or crying themselves. I couldn't tell you who or what grabbed me. It happened so fast. I can say that it was highly unlikely that this was the work of two spirits annoyed by a Halloween display.

As I worked my way through the room to the window along the far wall, I noticed the voice of the neighbor I'd had the confrontation with earlier today. I resisted the urge to tell him off and blame him for the predicament we now found ourselves. in. It wasn't easy. I eventually pulled the drapery back and noticed it was even darker on the other side of the window and couldn't figure out how that was possible. It seemed like every star I'd gone out of the night sky, that the light from the street lamps had been sucked into a vortex and like a cold, unremitting darkness had settled over the house. Illusions created by annoyed spirits are normal, but I couldn't say that's what this was. I just knew it was upsetting and unnerving.

As I looked what I assumed was outside, the darkness was suddenly replaced by two yellow pinpricks in the darkness, and a voice, casserating words unfamiliar to my ears. I wasn't sure whether the voice was too soft to understand or if the words were in a tongue foreign to me. But regardless, that soft tone of strange words caused a wave of panic throughout the group. I was not immune to the fear that held the group now, as several of them tried to bang on the door and even crashed through the window that I was in front of. For my part, I knew this was not normal, and did the best to fight the impulse to claw through the crowd and then the door. At that point, I was only sure of one thing. We had to get out of here.

I pulled out my phone to call Alma, my expert on supernatural lore, only to find no bars. What a shock. Were you shocked? Really? I decided to dig deep and try to think what advice she would probably give me. and that's when I called out to the group. They had to calm themselves.

They had to listen and not let their fear overtake them. I believe that fear was what was feeding the entity. Actually, I didn't know what to think, but it seemed like a better theory than not having any idea at all. With that in mind, I opened a meditation app on my phone. I downloaded the silly app one day when things were especially crazy in the office and used it a couple times. I guess it helped a bit, but I mostly found that kind of stuff.

stuff to be hoo-ha. Luckily, the basic functions of the app worked offline, so I started to play one of the downloaded episodes and had people listen. It started with a few, and then, like the fear, the calms seemed to catch on to many. I couldn't help but wonder if the app creator ever figured there would be a practical use for their work. One way or another, with the exception of a couple crying children and a few panic parents, the room started to calm down, and it felt like slowly the darkness started to start to

to lift. For the vast majority within the room, myself included, as the murky oppression started to lift, the improved mood caught, and people started to respond to it. Someone tried the door again and found the knob turned, and it could open the door, although it was weakly pulled shut a millisecond later. Seeing that our efforts were bearing fruit, strengthened the resolve of those in the room, and within a few minutes we were able to open the door and calmly exit it. well, at least most of us were. Those who were still panicked ran for the door to find themselves restrained. We tried to calmly tell them what they had to do,

but the more we explained in counseled tranquility, the more upset they seemed to get. Without us in the room, the darkness once again began to grow, starting in one corner and eventually overtaking a couple adults and a few children. There was nothing we could do. It was almost as if they were lost to their own inner demons.

Quickly we walked outside the house and we turned to the remaining people waiting. It was easier to tell them that the house had run out of candy. Someone thought to switch the porch light off as they walked outside. Another person called the police, though I had no idea what they were going to say to him. I did know, however, that they would search the house for the missing people. Flyers would go up, hands would ring. No one would be found. I also knew that this was going to mean I was never going to sell the house.

For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents, Down We Go, written by Alexandra Khan and narrated by Megan McDuffie. Seeking a higher understanding, a life-changing experience you will never forget, let me tell you. in a dead post-Soviet mining town. My school was surrounded by the same kind of fence you might see around the cemetery. To one side of it was the wasteland one had to walk through for 20 minutes in any weather conditions with no road or light. A cluster of never-finished buildings served as a playground to generations of schoolchildren. And every day, some grandma in my housing unit would shout at me, things like I am Jesus' marionette, you know, normal things. I was a little bit of accordingly depressed and prepared to rot away in one of those gray panel houses. But one single

experience with the hidden nature of this grim place completely changed the way I see my destiny. Back then, I was 13 and had to walk my dog, Monty, before going to sleep. They used to jump at every crunch and crackle the carpet of dead leaves made. I was always a little anxious. One night, Monty ran to me out of the thick darkness behind the bushes, his eyes shining. He checked in on me in his usual fashion and vanished again for a few more minutes. I stared at where I thought he was, my anxious brain wondering if it was just me or if the tree without branches was somehow moving closer. That's when I heard a car approaching.

As usual, I struggled to hide my fear from the car, counting the seconds until it passed. But the car didn't pass. It had stopped. A raspy male voice from the car. the window asked, what is such a young lady doing out so late? It wasn't the first time something like that had happened, but I still wasn't sure what to do. Tell him about my dog, keep silent, start walking away, but doing that provoke him. While I was mulling that over in my mind, I heard the click of a car door opening, freezing any thought I had. The second voice added,

all alone and I took off running without a second thought. They did the same. It only took a few moments for them to catch up to me and tackle me to the ground. I did all I could to scream and thrash around, trying to claw at his eyes. I barely registered the sound of a dog growling and realized Monty was trying his best to protect me. I imagined him biting at the other man, but I couldn't see anything. And the next thing I knew, I was being pushed into the car. my hands bound in zip ties.

The safety belt was wrapped around me, and one of the men slapped me in the face for a good measure. Both men took their seats in the front, huffing, and out of breath. One of them lit up a cigarette while another made a call. We've got a girl. We'll be back in ten minutes. Mm-hmm. See ya. And they drove back to the main road. I frantically tried to get my hands free.

If I could just get out of the car, whether it was moving or not, I thought I'd be fine. Even if it would kill me, it would be fine. Anything would be better than what I was already imagining what happened to me. After, I don't know how long, the car stopped and the door opened. One of the men pulled me out onto the rocky road before picking me up and tossing me onto his shoulder as if I weighed nothing. I tried to struggle, but he twisted my arms behind my back so hard I thought my shoulders would break. I stopped fighting, and he kept walking with me on his shoulder, like a bound-up pig. I couldn't see much in the darkness, but I recognized the place.

Any other cemetery around these parts had graves located in rows, but we were passing graves in some confusing pattern. It was the cursed cemetery, not in a wicked way, just cursed in the way that kids liked telling stories and exploring its old, overgrown labyrinth of memorial stones, spiky fences, and rotten trees. I also heard that two kids had died here after falling into the sinkhole, the sinkhole I was thrown to the ground in front of. Standing around the hole were a dozen men and a few women, all in dark, plain clothing, and all about as old as my parents, they looked at me with a kind of constrained sorrow. I was shaking and sobbing so hard, it was hard to move.

I began to crawl awkwardly to the hole, away from whatever they wanted to do to me. It wasn't far, and when I was almost to the end, I was. I realized I'd done their work for them as a heavy boot kicked me forward, and I fell. I landed painfully on my shoulder, but nothing broke, and I was still alive. I blinked through the tears and darkness enough to take in my surroundings. My landing had been softened by a half-wroughton mattress covered with autumn leaves. The floor under it was all rocks, dirt, and railways. I was in the mines.

Before that day, I was sure the mines had been flooded for years. I sat there a long time before I realized that I was in a place that no one thought existed anymore, and no one would look for me there. I knew I had to get free. I got up and walked toward where I thought the wall was to try to find a sharp rock and rub the zip tie against it. Instead of a wall, my eyes had adjusted enough to see bones and the old mine tracks. I screamed and stumbled to the side.

finally hitting the wall. I looked up and saw the people staring down at me in the moonlight. Not knowing what else to do, and afraid of what the mattress might be there for, I walked down the tracks and found one human skeleton after another. Some poorly mummified, some bear. I started to wonder if that was how they'd buried people in the cemetery, just throwing them down the sinkhole.

Every step walking in that echoing nothingness felt as if I was stepping off a cliff, and at the same time, as if the walls around me were closing in like a coffin. But I kept on walking. What other option did I have? I would get back to the sinkhole in the daytime if I didn't find another exit, and I would shout at every sound I heard. Elderly people often collected berries and flowers around these parts,

so maybe one of them would hear me. I can't say how much time passed, but when the adrenaline rush finally wore off and left me shaking and falling apart, I heard water. I almost started to run until I remembered that sound travels far in an empty mine, and I had to walk a long time to finally feel enough moisture in the air to get down on my knees. Worried I might suddenly fall into a stream of cold water, I moved on all forests for a long time. The rocks were wet and slippery. My throat seemed to shrink in on itself in anticipation. I almost considered just licking the ground to relieve my thirst. The pain in my shoulder

from the fall only got worse, and I had to hobble as I crawled, desperate to find the water. The moment my hand touched water, I gulped at it like a fish. I drank so much so quickly, I almost scared myself, but I couldn't stop. At some point, the weight of it all collapsed on me, and I blacked out on the edge of the water. I don't know if it was exhaustion, something in the water or something else entirely, but my head filled with obscure images. I understood something about the place I'd never heard of in school. This place needed people. I remember hearing about when the pilgrims first went to the Americas. The natives there taught them to bury fish with the corn seed to fertilize the soil. Just like that, this land had made a deal with the people. This land had been

dead when the first people came here. At some point, in exchange, was realized by chance, or through some supernatural understanding, people went into the land, through the caves or the mines every day, trading hours of their lives for farmable land. The images came faster and faster, and I understood, or at least I thought I did. The entire town was built to sustain this exchange, from school trips to the job market to cemeteries. The mine led everyone into the town's hungry underbelly. It was a mutually beneficial, symbiotic way of living. The town has been rapidly developing.

Families were moving to this patch of land from every corner of the country to build their futures together. In exchange, people lost years at the end of their lives. No one lived past their 70s here. They were just used up. Until the rising industrial capital of the Soviet Union fell into the dust with the union itself, This time, it wasn't even the people's fault. They didn't forget their promise, but the supply chain was broken. And despite the combined will of the townsfolk, it just wasn't in their power to keep the minds going.

We lost jobs, funds, progress and potential, people, dreams, and the future. We lost everything. Hollow and desperate, it was calling to us this day, but we'd mostly lost the ability to hear. those people who threw me here, they heard it. Now I heard it. I opened my eyes to the darkness, no longer afraid. It felt less like pressure and more like an embrace. I knew I would die there, so the land would live. Without food, I'd have a few weeks at most. I didn't get up for a long time, enjoying the ease the realization put me in. No more making excuses why I didn't want to get up and go to school. No more throwing out the disgusting food I was supposed to eat. No more existing.

I spent what later turned out to be four days, floating in a bliss of welcoming minds. I was exploring corridors and halls, gently guided through complete darkness by the depths themselves. I sat down for hours beside disregarded machinery. I drank water and slept in crawl spaces side by side with the bodies of my predecessors in different stages of decomposition. I didn't come close to the sinkhole that was my entrance here. Not once. All that time, not a single anxious thought crossed my mind. It's not like my head was empty, more like it was filled with something so extremely

accepting and cool, like a cold bed on a stale summer night. The humming presence of it filled me, pushing worries away. Like everything good in life, it ended sooner rather than later. After four days, my dog Monty managed to track me to. down, leading my mother and some other adults who didn't hear the mines. I fought the hardest against the people with flashlights who came to take me back to the surface. Corrupting daylight, fresh wind and road noises instantaneously dragged me into the swamp of living. There were so many things going on. I hated it so much. All these years later, all these thousands of miles away,

I still think about the mines. And while I can't go back down, for reasons beyond this story, I invite you to. I will tell you how to find the town. Bring your go-pros and your influencer culture and your hollow existences that only exist as dopamine doses released from a thumbs-up button. I know you don't care about politics or unrest, only attention. So go, share it. You can leave the mind whenever you desire, but I can tell you from experience. You won't want to. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration. Please visit creepypod.com.

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