Creepy - Day 20 - Haggerty's Trunk & Wait for the Punchline

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Haggerty's Trunk***Written by: J.T. Seate and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Bonus Episode: "Wait for the Punchline"***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***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.

No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling and disturbing creepyposters 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. Creepy presents the 31 Days of Horror. Day 20, Hagerty's Trunk, written by J.T. Seat and narrated by Nate DuFort.

No, it wasn't Pandora's Box, Haggerty's Trunk. It was, very old, however, and lined with newspapers dating back to 1918. and large enough to hold a full regiment of recollections. But the contents and the memories imbued by them weren't all that old, and not the type most good people would care to own. Haggerty, you see, was a collector of special items for special purposes. His compilation of artifacts consisted of absconded tokens taken from the scenes of unspeakable crimes. In earlier times, some might have claimed Haggerty possessed the sight, or the gift,

or that he was clairvoyant. He didn't know what moniker best suited his ability. What he did know was that when he worked a crime scene, and he pocketed some small object from the premises, his mind would be able to play back the event that had brought the crime squad to the location to begin with. The items he took were of no relevance to the police, but merely objects that had been witnessed to the crime, such as an ashtray or a spoon or a Christmas ornament. There was always a lot of action during the holidays.

With each object, a harbinger of things to come, he was able to simply hold it and concentrate. An invisible television screen popped on before him and replayed, the intense moment when someone was being brutalized or worse, the moment when someone's life was snuffed out. So much evil in the world, and I have the opportunity and ability to see more than its aftermath, Haggerty thought. I can see the moment when someone momentarily lost their cool or placed a well-thought-out plan into action. Each time he indulged himself, by reliving such a moment, he would place the pilfered item with care into the old trunk afterward. This was the storehouse, where the tiny treasures of a man who could see past the

carnage at the instant which it had occurred. His collection spanned three years on the job, and he especially enjoyed retrieving the older objects, the one in which the details of the event had begun to fade from his memory, and watch the scenes play out. again like a beloved movie. Following a long and tiring shift, Haggerty came home with a desire to revisit a girl that had been on his mind. He got into his sweats and slip on shoes and raised the lid of his trunk. He reached inside and found the object he sought.

Removing the metal bottle opener with the plastic handle, he held it before him, turning it this way. way in that, a relic from his first field mission. At the time he acquired the article, he hadn't known about his special gift. He just wanted a memento of his first assignment, one that dealt with the underbelly of daily lives the public doesn't get to witness. The people only hear about their society's ugly little incidences on the news. He took the bottle opener from the trunk and settled back in his easy chair. It was time to start at the beginning, again. This would be his third viewing, and he felt the twinge of anticipation coarse through his bones.

Although he had to imagine the screams, his visual replays were a thousand times better than watching fake crime on the moronic boob-tube. The blood would be real, and his disgust would be overridden by a greater sensation of, what would he call it exactly? Exaltation, perhaps. With the sound effects missing from Haggerty's six cents, he couldn't fully comprehend the entire story, but the 3D visions always held plenty of action, and in many cases, the rules of victim and perpetrator were not at all clear. Such was the situation in the bottle opener case. Haggerty scratched his crotch, then held the bottle opener before him with both hands. He remembered the night three years earlier when his crime unit was sent to the location in the early morning hours.

They had found two dead bodies on the kitchen floor, one was that of a teenage girl, and the other was what turned out to be her father. The middle-aged dead man had lain sprawled on his back with a butcher's knife protruding from his stomach. He was a sketch of sad humor with his matted chest hair peaking from the edges of his undershirt and his Bermuda shorts and underwear around his ankles. It seemed the incestuous man had attacked his daughter, and she had managed to plunge a butcher knife from the countertop into his fat belly. The case appeared open and shut,

but the thing that had the detectives grumbling was a small teasing question. How had the father managed to strengthen? his daughter to death before expiring from such a wound. The coroner explained that the stab wound produced a slow bleed rather than a hemorrhage, allowing the perp to first choke the girl, then pass out at the scene and finally croak. There seemed no other reasonable theory given the placement of the bodies. But there had been another option. Haggerty had seen the truth the night after his team completed their own.

job. It was in the safety of his apartment that he first handled the stolen bottle opener. Suddenly, as his eyes focused on the opener, a vision flashed in front of his eyes. An image appeared above the utensil like a giant weightless television screen that projected a replay of the crime scene. What he saw was the young victim, the one that had been plaguing his mind of late, standing at the sink and rinsing off a dish when a man entered the room. It wasn't the dead father. Haggerty judged this younger man to be someone she knew because of her initial calm as he approached. She turned and reacted without alarm. After the two spoke briefly, the man slapped her face and then choked her while her arms flayed wildly.

As she fell limply to the floor, the father entered. When he ran toward his daughter's murderer, the intruder picked up a kitchen knife and shoved it into the older man's belly. He shoved the father to the floor and waited for him to quit moving. With the two bodies awkwardly splayed underfoot, the killer maneuvered the girl so that he could wrap the fingers of her right hand around the knife's handle. Oh my God! Haggurty had breathed the first time he'd watched because the girl had suddenly moved.

She was not dead. The man's hands returned to her neck and squeezed once more, shaking her up and down, applying the killing pressure. The entire episode seemed to run in slow motion, although the entire event lasted less than two minutes. The murderer released the girl and let her body slip awkwardly against the cabinet below the sink. He unbuttoned the father's shorts and pulled them down to his ankles along with the man's underwear. Then with the heel of his hands, he applied pressure on the base of the knife handle

and shoved it deeper into the man's stomach, just to make sure, minding to avoid stepping into the spreading pool of blood. Then he left. Haggerty watched the scene play on. It revealed no further movement. The two dead people on the floor seemed to be waiting for a director to cry, cut, so they could get up and walk away, chuckling. Finally, Haggerty rested the bottle opener in his lap, and the invisible TV screen snapped off.

He breathed the post-rush sigh and allowed the excitement of the moment to ebb. Like each of the others he had witnessed, viewing this calamity brought forth emotions he wasn't entirely proud of, but they were feelings he was unwilling to deny himself. if he had shared this gift of replay with his colleagues, and if they didn't think him insane, perhaps many of these resolved horrors could have been solved. Perhaps the uncought murderers could have been brought to justice if the visions could have been backed up with physical evidence.

But Haggerty did not share this information with anyone, not because he thought no one would investigate the episodes he observed, but because he relished in privately relished, in privately reliving the events, mankind at its worst revealed to him and only to him on some telepathic television screen. The unfortunate victims could not be brought back,

so he simply viewed, savored the bizarre visions of these tragedies, and returned the items to his antique trunk that continued to fill with evil memories as his career progressed. He returned the items, object of his affection, the bottle-opener this time, to its hallowed place in the old chest, and slowly closed the lid. He thought about picking up a second selection, but he didn't want

to dilute the expression he'd seen on the dead girl's face by viewing another movie. He decided to spend the rest of his evening more conventionally. Reliving the saved events always took something out of him. It was a feeling similar to the conclusion of an organ, Sometimes he would combine the experiences during a viewing. Those were the times he usually placed himself in the role of the perpetrator of the crime, but tonight he wasn't in that kind of mood. He'd related more to the sad suffering female. Haggerty grabbed a beer from his fridge,

returned to his chair, and punched the power button on the TV remote. An ESPN image came to life between his outstretched feet, but his mind remained on the strange post-cognitive experience he had just witnessed. He was just dozing off when he heard an unusual sound, a thump. It sounded like someone or something, turning over and then settling suddenly on the ground. His eyelids fluttered and opened a little. His head shifted and his eyes searched the darkened room, lit only by the changing prism of blue then green color.

light that emanated from the alternating cameras at the old ballgame. He saw nothing unusual. Not until he looked at his trunk. It seemed to have stirred from its spot by half an inch. He had to be imagining it, but imagination time was supposed to be over. Then something else happened. He detected a god-awful stench. It was an odor he knew from his work,

from the times when death was not discovered for several days. Damn, he mumbled as the familiar but inexplicable aroma permeated the room. He looked toward his kitchen, thinking that anything this foul smelling must be coming from the kitchen sink pipes or the bathroom beyond. But he was wrong. There was another sound of, what? Sturing? His eyes returned to the chest. Icy pinpricks suddenly tap-danced on Haggerty spine.

and he seemed pinned to his lazy boy as he discerned the origin of the disturbance. A creepy crawly sound came from within the trunk, and he became aware of a putrid-looking brown stain that had seeped from between the smallest of spaces and its boards. Something unholy had entered the friendly comfortable confines of his domicile. The lid on the trunk raised an inch. A jolt from live electrical wires Touching the tips of his big toes

Would have been no more shocking than the sight Of what peaked out at him Through the sliver of space between the trunk and its lid Two red-rimmed round eyes Stared out in a ghostly fashion Surveying the room Then they locked onto the man in the chair The squeak from the old hinges

Had never bothered Haggerty until now As an arm raised the lid all the way open, and a figure stood gauntly inside the trunk. That eerie moment of silence that comes before a scream stalked Haggerty's vocal cords and only a grunt and a beer fart squeezed out of his two ends. Through the deceptive semi-darkness, the specter stepped out of the box and approached Haggerty. The spindly fingers that reached out from the dark place to brush against his cheek weren't out of a bad dream. They were revoltingly real.

Stay where you are, the apparition told him. He looked at what he still hoped was a creation of his overactive imagination. The voice was gentle. It did not sound like Jacob Marley's ghost come to rattle chains. Why do you watch me die over and over? The image asked him, and he suddenly realized who the phantom was. The girl from the bottle-opener, the one whose fingerprints he had taken from her cold, dead hand almost three hours ago.

Why do you not seek my murderer? His visions had never come with sound, gentle or otherwise. The image of the girl who had been in his head all evening certainly looked haunted, but not deformed from rot and decay. She wore her death clothes and appeared nearly the same as the day he had met her on the kitchen. floor, with eyes red from burst vessels and the ugly bruising on her neck, the day in which a man, unknown to the police, had killed her. He had no desire to give this specter his attention or find his voice. He couldn't see the point in having a conversation with a corpse. Perhaps this was just

a mutating form of his abilities to see what others could not. It wasn't a pleasant mutation for sure, what as real as the girl looked, she had to be some form of illusion, the same way his mind-movie of her death had been. You see and you don't act, she continued. If I just sit and keep my cool, she'll disappear, Haggerty hoped. You don't believe three times is a charm, she added. You've watched me die three times, and yet you stay, feeling gratification at what you see. You owe much, not for me alone, but for many. Haggardy's stomach turned suddenly sour.

His forgotten beer fell from his trembling hand, and with all his might he forced himself from the chair and ran past the girl, first to his front door, which he could not open, and secondly, toward the bathroom to spill his guts into the toilet bowl. He felt like putting his head all the way into the bowl and not coming up anytime soon. Perhaps expunging the undigested ham sandwich and sour beer could also eradicate the living dead that stood in his living room. From the darkness, he saw nothing except the shifts in light from faint to bright as the TV cameras changed.

He heard nothing but the crowd's buzz resulting from a score. He remained on his knees until he felt strong enough to rise. Even then, he only peeked out of his bathroom carefully, looking for what apparently was the other-world Avenger come to haunt him for his selfishness. She was still there, standing next to the television. Now she started toward him, not floating on the air the way he would have expected a spirit to do.

Her steps were as real and deliberate as a tornado stomping through a trailer park. And there was something else now. an object dangled from one hand. An axe, a very big and very real fire axe. But how did she get a hold of one? Then he remembered that her father, the man with a knife sprouting from his large belly, had been a fireman.

Haggerty wondered if his own psyche might have placed the swinging weapon at her side. Nothing made sense, but then his ability to be able to be able to be able to be able to be. to relive events in the past had never made sense. Haggerty closed the bathroom door and back to the far side of the cubicle against his tub. He waited, not knowing how to fight this battle, hoping somehow that he would wake up from his ghastly dream.

He would dispose of his trunk treasures. Better still, he would vow to this dead girl that he would take all the articles from the trunk and turn them into the police. That's the ticket I need to sell her. her. He would talk now, and he would tell her. The door cracked open. A thin sliver of light fell across Haggerty's face, dividing it into equal parts, a perfect target for the swinging axe. The figure of doom entered as silent as death and approached. Haggerty's lips moved to speak. Why me? He whined. What did I do to deserve this? There are too many restless souls in your

precious trunk, the round-eyed hapless girl said to the cowering figure on the bathroom floor. I'm going to take everything to the authorities and tell them what I've seen, he wailed. I'm going to make it. Too late, much too late, she told him. Third times a charm in our world, and your pitiful time is up. With the use of both of her hands, the axe rose above the girl's head. In one smooth motion, it swung downward in an arc. First, a crack, then squish,

were the sounds the axe created when it split Haggardie's head into equal halves. The young woman, dead before her time, was as real as she needed to be for this mission. She placed Haggertie's limp hands around the axe handle

to leave Prince and then let them flop back onto the floor. Anyone could tell he couldn't have exerted the power to do this himself, but with the door locked from the inside, no one in, no one out, let them try to figure it out. Maybe they would be smarter than they were about her and her father's demise. Maybe not, but she had extracted part of her revenge,

and when they find the articles in his trunk, they will at least know they had a weirdo on their hands. haggerty's legs lay splayed and his head tilted back much the way her body had been found in eternity ago she left the axe implanted in his skull but plucked a tube of tooth-paste from the top of his sink dying was the easy part she murmured to the corpse at her feet she carried the tube of paste with her as she returned to the living-room and the ball-game with the stench of violent death thickening the air she climbed back into the trunk and pulled down the lid. Inside the space that was as dark as a coffin, she held the half-used tube and said rather sweetly, You didn't know about the suffering your reruns put all of us through,

but you will learn now that I have killed you. There are several that can't wait to meet you, and best of all, you're going to experience the horror It went along with all of our deaths, as well as your own. Over and over and over. Then her voice changed abruptly into something cold and hideous, a voice that might have come from a scolding demon at an altar in hell, which snickered to Haggerty.

Over and over, right here in your darling little trunk of God. Hold in their memory. No one could hear the piteous moan that came from a darkness beyond darkness, a prison from which there was no return, inside Haggerty's trunk, not over the sound of a TV commercial, and not over the sound of greedy spirits, sighing over the sweet pleasure of eternal revenge. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents,

Wait for the punchline. It started last year. Halloween night. The trick-or-treaters had all long since fallen into their sugar-imposed comas. Pumpkins had all been brought inside or smashed. That's what I told the cops. I gave them all the details, mostly. I was sitting at home one night, minding my own business,

watching the sports channel when I heard a knock in my door. I don't know if it's just me or me. or movies make you think people knocking on your door is normal, but I always tense up when I hear a knock or a doorbell. Who the fuck is out there? Instead of texting me something, I can try to avoid. Maybe I'm weird, and there are people who get all golden retriever when they hear the door? I immediately think it's some psycho.

Still, you can't hear someone knock on your door and just ignore it. Sooner later, you have to check, right? even if it's the morning, as if people were going to leave a note or something. I had enough beers, and my team was down enough for me to be just pissy enough to see who was there. I don't have a peephole, so I had to open the door. What I saw, the person in front of me, well, I know he wasn't the one who did any knocking. In my feet, right in front of my door, I saw something. that it took a second for my mind to put together.

I mean, I knew what it was, but it didn't make any sense being there. At my feet, instead of in a horror movie. It was the head and torso of what I assumed to be a man. And that was it. No arms, no legs. They've been cut off and the wounds look coterized. The head was just lulled to the side,

away from me as if looking out for someone coming up to walkway. I don't remember if I swore or yelled or what, but I did call the cops as soon as I had enough sense to know what to do. I didn't have one of those doorbell cameras, but I do now. I gave the cops the details as I knew them, told them the whole story. They asked if the body looked familiar, and I said no. They asked if I was sure. I said, yeah, I was sure.

I had no idea who the guy was. That was a part I kind of lied about. I mean, I'd never seen the guy before in my life, and I had no idea what his name was. But I have to admit, for whatever reason, in my head, I gave the guy a name. I called him Matt. A friend of mine who has a little fishing shack in Florida

heard about what happened. I'm not a fisherman, but he was always a man. trying to give me to go out with him. He said I needed to get away from it all and have some time to clear my head. Seeing as how, I didn't really want to spend any more time in my house after that, I took him up on his offer. For two days, we fished, drank, and ate whatever bar food we could stumble across. The fishing wasn't very good for whatever reason.

My buddy said some fishing reason I didn't follow, but I just assumed it was my own bad luck. Not that I was bothered. I didn't like the idea of even touching a fish, let alone gutting one for dinner. I'd take a burger and fried cheese curds over that any day. On the third day, we went out one last time before I had to leave. The whole scene was picture perfect. Beautiful weather, calm waters, a cold beer in the hot sun. I couldn't have been in a better mental place.

And that was when my friend caught something on his hook. He reeled it in. All smiles as his pole thrashed around and he guessed about the weight of his catch. I grabbed the net to help scoop it in. Without thrashing in the water, I could barely make out the shape of the fish and just did my best to get it in the net.

So when I swung it up on the deck, I wasn't looking at what I had, just where I was going to drop it. My buddy guessed the thing was going to be 40 pounds. He was a bit off. I had guessed closer to 80. no idea how much it would have weighed if it had arms and legs. The remains of the guy were almost unrecognizable.

The fish had clearly eaten most of what identified him. The scene itself probably looked like something out of an old silent movie comedy with the two of us running around the deck, slipping and falling in the puddles, yelling about what we should do. When the Coast Guard arrived, my buddy was slamming beers. So I gave them the details as I knew him. told him the whole story. They asked if the body looked familiar,

and I said no. They asked if I was sure. I said, yeah, I was sure. I had no idea who the guy was. That was a part I kind of lied about. I mean, I'd never seen the guy before in my life as far as I knew, and I had no idea what his name was. But I have to admit,

for whatever reason in my head, I gave the guy a name. I called him Bob. The police held on to me after that one once I told them about the first body. Get me the full 24 hours and told me they'd be checking in with my local police and letting them know what happened as they continued their own investigation. For weeks I was followed around by random patrol cars. Never in my life if I've been such a law-abiding driver.

Finally, a few days ago, after it all seemed like it was behind me. after therapy was actually convincing me that death wasn't following me and I was a victim of horrible probability and not some demented mind. I went on a date. She ran with a more alternative crowd, and the date was one of those where you're pretty sure that it's going to end, and you just want to avoid how badly it's going to end. She wanted to go see her friend's new performance.

Her friend, the performance artist. Joy. I immediately started worrying about horrible spoken word poems and strange expressions of shock. But all that worry slipped away as we heard the screaming. As we turned the corner in the gallery to one of the pieces, all we saw was a rush of people running away. Some crying, others even throwing up. On the wall, just in front of us, was a torso. Again, a man's head.

it. And that was it. Just taped or glued or stapled or I don't know what to the wall. The head looking down and to the side as if you just dropped something. When the cops and feds showed up, I gave him the details as I knew him, told him the whole story. They asked if the body looked familiar, and I said no. They asked if I was sure. I said, yeah. I was sure. I had no idea who the guy was. and evidently neither did my date. That was the part I kind of lied about. I mean, I'd never seen the guy before in my life as far as I knew.

No clue if she had. And I had no idea what his name was. But I have to admit, for whatever reason in my head, I gave the guy a name. I called him art. After the cops and feds were done questioning us, we ended up going back to her place, at her request. And I'll admit, I was a little shaken by everything considering not to mention of sudden

eagerness to get to bed. Call it a response to trauma, trying to find comfort from the awfulness we just saw. Maybe she was just turned on by the true crime shit. When we got into her room, I was really taken aback. Evidently, my date was a pole dancer. She'd done burlesque, exotic, even had a good social media. following doing aerial work. I know there are people who have stripper poles in their room,

but I'd never seen a room with three of them. She managed to draw my attention away from the poles and to other things. In the morning, just for a moment, one blissful moment, I forgot about the horrors from the night before. Shit, the entire year. I sat up in bed, looking around the room, only to see her over by the poles. At first I thought she was stretching or something

because I could only see her back. Then I realized there wasn't anything else to see. Her torso sat there, upright, right between two poles. My mind froze and all I could manage was to call out her name. Annette? For more information on this podcast, including how to serve you. your own story for consideration. Please visit creepypod.com.

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