Creepy - Day 2 - Bring Up Your Dead & Anatomically Correct Pumpkin

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Bring Up Your Dead (starts at 4:52)***Written by: Deirdre Coles and Narrated by: Nichole Goodnight***Anatomically Correct Pumpkin (starts at 20:14)***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm John Grills from Creepy, and I listen to the Be Afraid Podcast Network. Creepy presents the 31 days of horror. Day 2. No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastoral. 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. Hey, guys, over here. Sorry I didn't wait. I'm starving. Order whatever you want.

Are you going to say anything about last night, John. Where do you mean? Wait a second. What do you mean? John. We'd all really appreciate it if you could fill us in on what exactly happened last night. Seriously, I told you guys not to stay up drinking.

That's not what she meant. She was talking about you running into the bar, yelling at us, then running out again. I'm sorry, what? I'll stop it. Please. Come on. Just tell us what your game was so we can move on with things and enjoy ourselves a little without worrying that things are going to go to shit. Again. Listen, I'm sorry about whatever I might have said last night. But I honestly don't know what you're talking about. Last thing I remember was leaving the bar and hitting back to the hotel to go to sleep.

Like I said, travel days take it out of me. But, um, listen, I know that. I know that. things have been weird with me, basically for the last year. So there's, there's just been a lot going on. And I've been getting scattered. So if you hear me say anything that doesn't make sense, or out of context or whatever, just ignore it and move on. John, are you doing okay? Yeah, yeah, I am. I've really been looking forward to coming here. And I just don't want to do anything to mess things up. Also, I'm sorry for springing the whole storytelling thing on you all last night.

I know that's not exactly how we work. So there will be a bit more heads up before you're all in that situation again. We'd really appreciate it. Hey, at least the crowd seemed to like it. Yeah, people have been staring at us since we walked in. This must be what it feels like to be a lifestyle influencer. I can finally sell some of these gentlemen. Owen, those dice are for tabletop games.

Shh, let him have his fun. He's so excited. Anyway, I gotta get going. I have some business to take care of while we're here. What business? I thought this was a vacation. Do what you love and you work every day for the rest of your life. I've said that before, haven't I?

Anyway, one of you is going to be up again for story time tonight. So... Wait, there's another open mic again tonight? Yep. Every night. I thought I said that yesterday. Regardless. One of you asked to tell a story tonight.

Why? I don't know if you've noticed this, but we're the only tourists here. I think it'd be best if we at least tried to fit in if we're going to be here all months. Besides, it's literally what we do. So, like I was saying, one of you has a story to tell the night. So, why don't you all figure that out now instead of on the spot?

I'll cover breakfast and see you later. I know I should be more concerned, but honestly, the pancakes here smell way too good for me to care right now. And the mattress at the bed and breakfast I'm at? I don't know the last time I slept that well. I guess we just enjoy ourselves and tell stories all month. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So, who's going to tell a story tonight? I guess I could tell people about bring up your dead. Let's just pretend this isn't a true story. That way I won't have to waste time assuring you that I'm not crazy and you won't have to pretend like none of this sounds familiar. So back to when it happened. Brandon told me the plan for Halloween and I rolled my eyes. I told him we were probably going to run into half of the high school hanging out in the graveyard on Halloween night. What a cliche.

Jules didn't particularly want to go either, but she also didn't want me and Brandon to fight. Chris and David told me to shut up if I didn't have a better idea, so shut up I did. The five of us were kind of stuck with each other at this point. We had been a part of a larger circle of friends ever since we started high school. Freshman year, we started hanging out with each other and with Tess and Rowan and Ben, who were a year older than us. Those three had graduated and headed off to college a few months ago, leaving our group with no clear leader and maybe not that much in common anymore.

The cracks were starting to show. I wore a black-hitted cloak. I figured a half-assed costume was appropriate for our half-assed plans for the night. Brandon picked Jules and I up from her house. David was already in the front seat and we crammed in next to Chris in the back. My mood improved a little once Chris pulled out a bottle of fireball and started passing it back and forth. He gave us each a little box of cinnamon redhads to go with it. but he made us say trick or treat every time he wanted to drink because he's just that kind of jackass.

I was kind of hoping St. Matthew's Church Graveyard would be locked and we'd have to give up on the plan. But the front gates were flung open. I rubbed the back of my neck uneasily. Maybe it was some kind of Halloween custom. But surely that was a terrible idea, leaving it open for just anybody to walk in. We parked the car and trooped inside in silence. There were a surprising number of fresh graves. long heaps of damp soil with tumbles of floral arrangements.

I crouched down to pluck a tiny marigold from one of them. Brennan hissed at me, scandalized, but I just shrugged back. If he was so concerned about respecting the dead, he shouldn't have suggested this stupid outing. Chris told us to follow him over to the older section where there were stone angels and massive family tombstones. Chris pointed out his favorite statue, a sorrowful, veiled woman clutching a bundle of flowers to her breast.

Apparently, his Cub Scout troop used to come out here to volunteer sometimes, picking up litter and such. He said he always thought the woman would exhale one day, and her veil would float up so he could see her eyes. But he knew they wouldn't be sad eyes. They would be furious. She'd be enraged that someone was still alive while her beloved was dead. Chris always was a drama queen. Suddenly, I stumbled sideways and grabbed for the tombstone next to me. The others also staggered and braced their feet.

There had been a deep bellowing vibration in the ground beneath my feet, like when Tess brought me to an all-ages show last winter. I was too tired to keep dancing, and I looked stupid doing it anyway, so I sat down on some big wooden boxes close to one of the speakers, and my whole body vibrated along with every note of the music. Here, in the graveyard, my first thought was an earthquake. We all exchanged glances and then started to run back towards the pathway. Nobody wanted to risk those tall,

marble angels toppling over on us. Then we heard, or maybe felt, a series of booms, like the tolling of gigantic bells. Sometimes a tiger's roar is too low for human hearing. It crosses over into infrasound, which can travel for miles and can actually penetrate your bones. You can literally feel the tiger's voice vibrating your ribs and your organs before you ever hear it with your ears. That's what these sounds were, just on the knife's edge between infrasound and

and hearing. David slapped my arm gesturing. Just down the slope, there were a group of people gathered around a recent grave, soil, mounted high. I dropped to the ground looking for something to hide behind. Were they security guards, cops, something else? It was weird that they didn't have any flashlights. You would think they would on a new moon night like this.

I thought of a show I'd seen where a murderer concealed the bodies of his victims by hiding them inside fresh graves. Wouldn't it be just our last? luck if we stumbled on some kind of serial killer support group. I was trying to scurry over to a spot behind a tombstone when a pair of scuffed boots suddenly appeared in front of my face. The people from down the slope had very definitely seen us and evidently wanted to chat. I stood up shakily.

As it turned out, people wasn't really the right word. From a little distance away, they could have passed for short, very muscular humans. But the being in front of me was something else entirely. That was clear by the size of his big tuft ears and huge round golden eyes. I gasped out loud. Bad timing. Because at that exact moment, the creature held his cupped hand in front of his face and blew out gently, sending a puff of grayish smoke toward me.

I breathed in grave dust and toadstools, fish scales and damp soil, and I felt my legs lock into place. Like a pair of railroad spikes shot out from the soles of my feet and deep into the ground below rooting me to the earth. I heard Chris's shell scream and looked around. Brandon tried to run, but one of the creatures casually reached out and looped a long, rangy arm around him and dragged him back. Jules and David and Chris were already coughing and blinking and standing with unnaturally stiff legs.

In another minute, Brandon was caught too. The one who caught me shook his head disapprovingly at Brandon, and then turned to me. He did something with his face. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be. a smile or a simple bearing of teeth, but I cringed back. As much as I could, anyway, frozen in places I was. I was shocked when he started to speak. He explained to us that his people were here to do a job. And us? We were conscripts. He said you could pretty reliably round up a few humans to press into service if you had a graveyard on Halloween night. He took my arm. His hand had long fingers

with broad, spatulate tips, sprouting claws. He mumbled something and I felt my legs unlock, but they still weren't under my control. I found myself marching along in the direction he was dragging me. We reached one of the recent graves and he pressed a shovel into my hands and told me to get started. My arms started moving of their own volition. I scooped up a shovelful of earth and tossed it to the side.

Around me, I could hear the others. Chris was crying. Brandon was shouting protests and threats, but all of us were digging. My captor seemed very pleased with himself and in the mood to chat. He and his companions here were ghouls. What ghouls do is they dig up graves. Lots of things buried in human graves aren't exactly human, he told me. I probably knew about vampires, those flashy bastards always drawing attention to themselves.

And ghouls, like himself, who never got to be the sexy romantic leads because they dined on undead flesh rather than living blood. He spoke with the bitter tone of a long-standing grievance. But there are other things that awakened underground, he said. Most of them kept a lower profile than the vampires. Litches and whites and revenants and a bunch of other weirder things that no human had ever heard of at all. Most of those things passed as human and appeared to die in the usual way, at which point

they were buried by unsuspecting actual human. and many of those things could eventually make their way free of their coffins and graves. But oh, this modern age! With locking caskets and dirt so rocky and heavy it takes a backhoe to dig out a grave site, it's hard out there for the undead. So the ghoul struck a deal. They would roam around and visit graveyards, moving in circuits like a traveling theater troupe. They'd ring their gigantic grave bell and any undead awake below the ground would answer.

That explained the sounds we had heard. But in that moment, I didn't care. In case you don't know, digging is very hard work. My hands were blistering on the wooden handle of the shovel, and my back was screaming. Once I got a couple of feet below the ground, I had to get down into the grave to dig. And I had no choice but to keep digging. The tip of my shovel finally hit a wooden casket. I was trying to figure out what to do next when a woman exploded upward in front of me like a breaching whale.

Finally, she yelled. Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting? She pulled herself fully out of a coffin with a shattered lid and clambered to her feet. She brushed dirt off her cream silk blouse and the string of her pearls around her neck. Then she looked at me and she grinned. Fang's gleaming whiter than the pearls. Nope, you can't have this one, my captor told her. He caught out to the other ghouls asking if any of their human thralls were slacking off. One of them answered that we were more or less worth keeping alive, although the night was young.

A disappointed vampire Karen went harrumphing off, presumably to speak with the manager. My goal extended a ropey arm down into the grave with me. I took his hand, suddenly more interested in appearing useful. He hauled me out effortlessly. They might be short and ugly and weird, but they were so much stronger than us. I wondered why they even bothered to make us do the digging when they could have done it so much faster themselves. He guided me to another section of the graveyard. I was pretty sure he'd made a mistake. This one wasn't fresh at all. I still glance at the headstone which showed a date death of 27 years ago.

He saw where I was looking. He told me I was in for a treat. Vampires don't take long to bounce back from the whole being dead thing. But some other creatures take a longer time to ripen, like pin cherry seeds, which can sleep 50 years before they sprout. He had a very deep. different idea of treat than I did. The decades had packed the earth down hard over this one, but I finally, torturously uncovered an old wooden coffin. My captor handed me a hammer and a spike and told me to make a hole in the center. When I pierced the wood, a thick fog poured out of the opening.

It spun slowly into a whirlpool, rising up into the air. A figure with paperweight skin and hair stepped out of the funnel of smoke and walked away without a word. under other circumstances I would have been amazed and terrified by the strange things I saw that night. But I was in so much pain from my crabbed fingers and torn up blistered palms and the agony in my hips and back that I could hardly react. The next coffin was cracked open and the ghoul carefully lifted an ancient crone out. The minute her feet touched the ground, ripples of new life flowed down from the crown of her head.

Her long white hair sprouted yellow streaks and her wrinkles filled out and her back straightened. Within a few minutes, she looked like a gorgeous college student within probably red golden hair. She wore a dress of rotted finery, but it would probably pass for a Halloween costume tonight. How convenient. She was one of the few unburied who actually thanked the ghouls before she took her leave.

To add insult to injury, the ghouls didn't seem too happy with our performance. I heard one of them muttering that last Halloween, they'd caught an entire football team and finished up for the night in a couple of hours. Why'd they have to put up with shoddy specimens like us? I was pretty sure we weren't going to survive the night, whether we worked hard or not. I was almost hoping the ghouls would turn us over to one of the vampires, because that, at least, seemed to promise a relatively quick death.

But that wasn't what happened. They marched us over near the entrance of the cemetery. One of them pulled what looked like for all the world, like a chicken egg out of his pocket and smashed it on top of David's head. whisper fine golden netting cascaded down from the point of impact and David slumped bonelessly to the ground he's not dead they told us we were just going to fall asleep and forget all about this night

and wake up with wretched hangovers and sore backs I was the last one standing I felt the impact of the crack and the soothing flow of the golden mesh over my body but I didn't fall down or fall asleep I didn't feel tired at all in fact I felt great I looked down at my hands where the blisters were knitting up as I watched.

I stretched in my back relaxed and straightened. Was I maybe a little bit taller? The goals were staring at me. Oh shit, the leader said. They became suddenly extremely polite. They said there was no way they could have known. I didn't even know myself, did I? What I was?

They said I wouldn't fall asleep. I wouldn't forget. I would probably lead a more or less normal life. life if that's what I wanted, and that one day they or another group like them would come and dig me up. They would unearth whatever it was I turned out to be. So that's what brought me here to you. You're hard to find. It took me a long time, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. Like I said, let's pretend it's not a true story, although you don't look at all surprised or skeptical about anything that I've said so far. But if, hypothetically, someone like me experienced,

something like that, would you be able to tell me what it means? Because it turns out I am not the kind of person who can leave well enough alone and wait to see how life unfolds. I am left with one really important question. What am I? Hey, John, ready for another round? Oh, hey everyone. What's up? Did you get your errands dumb?

Um... Uh, no, not exactly. I'm working on it, though. Heard Nicole's story earlier. What, what are you all doing here? Just stopping in for a nightcap. We can checkin stuff out all day. This place is really beautiful.

Like, it was made for Halloween. It's enough to not think about how this is supposed to be such a haunted place. Yeah, it's, um... It's something. Are you okay? Sure. Just got a lot on my mind at the moment. What's this thing supposed to be?

It's a turnip. Why did someone carve a face in it? Seriously? You guys don't know about this? I guess we must have missed the turnip carving tutorial. Ooh, great idea. Why don't they use pumpkins? They don't carve pumpkins around here.

For real? In the most haunted town is, In America, they don't carve pumpkins on Halloween. But I've seen pumpkins all over the place. They're just props. I don't think anyone wants to spend the time or take the risk on making an anatomically correct jackal lantern. It's weird to think that the first jackal lanterns weren't made out of pumpkins. They were made out of turnips.

Maybe you saw that movie Holcomb and noticed one on the bar. If not, go give it a watch. Frankly, go watch it regardless. I love stuff like that, little nods of authenticity. The whole thing traces back to an Irish folktale about a guy named Stingy Jack. A few centuries back, there was a town drunk that went by the name Stingy Jack. Jack had a reputation of being a bit of a con man, who'd been cheating people his whole life. In fact, he'd developed such a reputation that Satan himself heard word and decided to see for himself

if Jack lived up to the reputation. So one night Jack was stumbling down the street, drunk as usual, and comes across a body lying in the road. When he stops and looks, who is it but Satan himself, smiling back, dare to collect Jack's wicked soul. Jack, being the ever manipulator, convinced his Satan that if he's going to hell anyway, at least let him get a drink first.

Satan saw no reason to say no, so they go to the local bar where Jack starts down and drinks. At the end of the night, Jack tells Satan that he needs to settle the tab. But of course, the devil doesn't carry around a wallet, so Jack convinces him to turn himself into a piece of silver. Then Jack can use him to pay the tab, and then the devil can turn back when no one's looking. Confusing?

Yeah, I know the feeling. But Satan seemed to think this was great because this human had no end of conniving. He agrees, and Jack takes the devil-turned silver piece and puts it in his pocket, where he also happens to have a crucifix. Now Satan is trapped and pissed, and willing to do whatever he can do to escape. So Jack says I'll let him go as long as he can be free of him for ten more years. Satan agrees and disappears as soon as Jack takes away the crucifix.

Flash forward ten years, and like clockwork, Satan shows up to take Jack's soul away. But Jack is still Jack and convinces the devil to let him have an apple from a local apple tree before they go. He's so famished, he can barely move. And so Satan climbs the tree to grab an apple, and as he does, Jack lays a bunch of crucifixes around the tree. Now furious about being tricked again, Satan agrees to never take Jack's soul to hell, as long as he lets him go. Jack does, and once again, Satan disappears. Eventually, Jack drinks himself to death and finds himself at the gates of heaven. But before he can go in, God himself stops him and says Jack can't go to heaven because he's a horrible piece of shit.

I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure. And he'll be forced to spend eternity outside the gates. Jack's a lot of things, and he's driven off a lot of people in his life. That doesn't mean he cares much for loneliness. So soon enough, he can't stand the isolation and makes his way to hell and begs to come in. Satan just stands there shaking his head, saying he asks to fulfill his obligation to Jack to never let him in hell. Instead, he hands Jack and ember and a turnip,

which I think was actually a large Rudebaga specifically. Now Jack has only the glowing light inside the vegetable to light his lonely path in the afterlife. Ever since, turnips were hollowed out and used as lanterns carved with grotesque faces to ward off evil spirits during the festival of Sawain. As maybe you can imagine, A place like this has more than a passing interest in keeping evil away. In fact, they're pretty serious about it.

So when you look around and see the turnips, well, mostly turnips, maybe it'll make sense. They don't want to do things wrong. So kids don't carve pumpkins even. Any pumpkins are either painted or bought as decorations. No, you don't try and carve a pumpkin here. I mean there was one time. At least I suppose, but there's always one time.

There's always someone who just can't help themselves. Always a contrarian who's sure that everyone else is wrong or overreacting. Let's call him Joey for the sake of this. I really have no idea why people never carved pumpkins and stuck with the turnip tradition, but I'm guessing whatever it was never got recorded or reported. and I'm guessing it was probably something like what happened to Joey. Joey was that kid. If you told him about Bloody Mary, he'd rush to the first mirror he could find.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of him being a non-believer or what, but he was the one to disprove anything. Any story you ever heard about the town and he'd roll his eyes, call you a chicken or a sissy or whatever, and claim he'd never be afraid to do it. He was kind of social media post-2020. He just had to do his own research and refused to believe what anyone said. His parents, teachers, friends, police, anyone.

The kid was destined to hard times. But some people just are, aren't they? One October, when everyone else is doing what everyone else does, Joey decides that he's going to go to the pumpkin patch in the neighboring town and steal a pumpkin, carve it, and leave it somewhere to mess with people. Joey, being that kind of kid, wasn't going to make anything really accurate or well done. Instead, he just sort of made some slashes in the pumpkin flesh that sort of looked like a mouth, nose, and one eye. Wasn't anything strange.

At least, nothing strange by most people's standards. But here, here people tend to be sticklers for accuracy. At some point in the night, Joey went and put pumpkin right in the middle of town where people were most likely to see it in the morning due to their regular routines. It didn't take long for people to notice the pumpkin there, and not long after that they noticed the eye. Not the one carved out of the pumpkin, I mean the other eye. There it was, as if growing out of the pumpkin itself.

A single blue human eye in the place of where the other eye, the one Joey left out should have been. Looking closer, you could see the optic nerve hanging like a tentacle behind the mouth slit. It was as if the pumpkin had grown around, a severed eyeball. It didn't take too long to trace things back to young Joey, mostly because of the 911 call that happened that morning when Joey's parents went to wake up their son, only to find him completely unconscious, and missing his left eye.

The same eye that he left out from the pumpkin he carved. Doctors were able to match the eye they found in the pumpkin with Joy's DNA. It's definitely Joey's eye. But no one, and I mean no one, had so much as a theory about how it could have happened. Joey himself was in a coma for over a week before waking up screaming. They say he's been under observation ever since. You'd think this would have been enough to scare most of the same?

kids straight, so to speak. But kids like them, they don't want attention. They crave it. It doesn't really matter what it's for. So, the next year, a high school kid named Lawrence went ahead and did the same thing.

Got a pumpkin, carved it up. But this time, put it near the cafe for the early morning crowd. And this time when he carved it, he made two eyes and nose. But for the mouse, instead of the more traditional crescent-shaped mouth, maybe with a few square-shaped teeth,

it looked like he'd started to cut the mouth, but then just left it with a single curved cut. Later, Lawrence would claim he'd been interrupted by his parents coming home and rushed to hide the pumpkin instead of finishing it. That decision would change his life forever. That morning, not one person who showed up at the cafe had much interest in eating, not after they saw Lawrence's pumpkin. It looked exactly like how he cut it,

except for one part. Now it had a mouse. Like the eye from the previous year, now underneath that single cut where the mules should be, was what turned out to be a complete lower jawbone, teeth and shreds his skin there for all to see, like someone had grabbed the lower part of someone's mouth and just yanked it out before shoving it

into the bottom third of a pumpkin. Lawrence was found in his bathroom, unconscious in a pool of his own blood. The lower part of his jaw removed by means the doctors were never able to determine. Any communication from Lawrence from then on was by pen and paper. But even that's rare.

He mostly just sits in a chair at the hospital, staring out the window with a feeding tube attached to where his jaw used to be. Third times the charm isn't really a thing here. people tend to get the lesson quick enough see enough bad things and tempting fate doesn't happen nearly as much so go ahead and carve your pumpkins or your turnips

but if you're going to do that here you do it right you make it anatomically correct unless you're willing to lose a piece of yourself to make the decoration whole okay so maybe let's skip carving pumpkins I think that would be best Okay

You all have a good night I need to lay down Good night, night, night See you in the morning Don't let the bed, bugs, bye Man, he really took a turn today, didn't me You know how stressed he gets When we do this trips

I wish he could relax a bit And enjoy himself this time Agreed And if we can get him to loosen up a bit I bet he'll feel like a new man by the end of the month then I think we all need to do our part to make that new man better than the old one. How's that?

When he gets weird, just roll with it. Like he said this morning, be there for him. Support his weird moot swings. Worth a shot. What's the worst that can happen? For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypark.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 Shera-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.