Day 20 - Stuffed & The Neighborhood That Wasn't There
00:00I'm John Grills from Creepy, and I listen to the Be Afraid Podcast Network.Creepy presents the 31 Days of Horror.Day 20.No.This is creepy.A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastures 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.
00:47Listener discretion is advised.Hey John.I figured I'd see you at the bar tonight.Nah, not tonight.I get it.I could use a break, too.Got any s'mores?Sorry. No. Kind of.
01:15What was that?Nothing. I was... I was just getting nostalgic.Back when we did our first creepaway camp, just us sitting around the campfire, telling stories.Simple.Didn't you get attacked by Galtese or something?Something like that. But before that, things used to feel simpler.Times change. People change.Not much we can do about it.
01:43Ain't that the truth.No reason they can't still be like that, though.What do you mean?We're here. There's a fire.You got a story?Of course.It's called.Stuffed.
02:01The boy lived across the street from the scarecrow.He was a fearful child who would grow into a fearful adult in his 20s.He would move directly from the comfort of his mother to the comfort of his wife.As a man, he would work diligently, drive slowly,and aspire to nothing that could not be formulaically achieved.As a boy, he stayed inside and looked out of his window.His room was on the top floor of the house,and his window faced the cornfield.
02:47When he looked out plainly,the scarecrow was nothing more than a dark,uppercase tea, standing tall above the leaves.But using his binoculars,he could see it clearly.A thick beam buried securely in the soil,with a flat plank,nailed perpendicularly at the top.
03:13top, a stuffed burlapsack for a head, no face, sewn to a straw hat.A raggedy loose-fitting cloth shirt like a pirate's, with the sleeves tucked into leather glovesthat hung limply. All of it blew violently in the wind. And the boy wondered how it stayedintact. Crow's sap perched along the arms.casually preening their feathers, as if to taunt the farmer.The only time they flew away was when the giantautomated sprayers rolled through the fields,looking like sentient robotic monsters,
04:04dowsing the crops with a sour fluid that made the neighborhood close its windows.Once the boy had asked his father what the scarecrow was for,as it clearly did not deter the birds.His father had told him that the scarecrow's purpose was actually did not scare off crows,but children.He said that eating the corn directly from the stalks could make a child very sick,maybe even kill them.As a means of protecting the children,
04:39a scarecrow had risen and myths had trickled down family trees.Miss about scarecrows that sprang into life,Any time, man anyone entered the field.And about them being used as vessels to house the souls of deceased family members, thoughlore had been constructed solely to keep children from swallowing the poisonous corn.The boy cleverly thought it should be called a scare kit.Two weeks before Halloween, the boy brought his binoculars to his window to look at theHe watched the shirt of the scarecrow drift back and forth in the breeze until finally a crow approached and landed on the arm.
05:34But as soon as it came, it was brushed swiftly off his perch by the sharp tines of a pitchfork that shot up from beneath a curtain of leaves.Several minutes later, another crow came and was just as quickly shoeed away.The boy followed the handle of the pitchfork down to a pair of small hands and shaky arms.Between the stalks, he saw a girl with hair as black as the feathers of the crows.He recognized her instantly.They had been in the same grade since three years.ago, when she had appeared suddenly in the middle of the semester.She spoke very little and had been alone each of the times the boy had, in passing, seen her.
06:30His classmates had whispered about her, saying that she lived on a plot of land with chickensthat were her only friends, and that she ate the same lunch every day.A banana covered in peanut butter wrapped in a tortilla.She walked to school, as if her parents had not thought of arranging for the bus to pick her up.Some kids wondered if she had any parents at all.The girl looked sternly to the sky, brown furrowed in concentration,and swept across the arms of the scarecrow until the crows made their retreat.Then she sat in the shade of the lid.
07:18leaves and spoke to the scarecrow.Her fingers, digging-eyedly through the soil as she did.Her face looking up occasionally to make sure it was listening.Before climbing into bed that night, the boy went to the window and looked through the binoculars.It was difficult to find the head of the scarecrow in the darkness.But when he did, he saw the bright yellow shirt of the black.the girl. She sat among the roots, watching the scarecrow, talking to it when she could think ofsomething to say. The boy watched the girl until the passing headlights on the road became more infrequent,
08:04and his eyelids became heavy. When he woke the next morning, the girl was still in the cornfield.She laid on her side, using her dirty hands as pillows, fast to sleep.As the sun rose, the boy noticed movement on the southeast end of the field.The stalks bent and receded, making way for something that was headed directly for the girl and the scarecrow.When he focused the binoculars on the disturbance, he found the farmer.shuffling carefully through the leaves in his overalls.He wore a straw hat that was not unlike the one the scarecrow wore.His neck was bent, and the only part of his face the boy could see was his grizzled chin.
09:01He carried a handful of straw in either hand.The farmer approached a small parcel of bare land where the scarecrow stood.He reached up and stuffed the straw down the collar of the scarecrow's shirt.Then he left the way he had come, never paying a glance to the girl.Less than an hour later, before the boy left for school, he looked for the scarecrow again.He found it, lit by the shiny, dewy corn that surrounded it, with three crows lined up along its arms.The boy waited for the pitchfork to rise and shoe the birds away when it did not come.He searched the ground.
09:53The girl was gone.Once again, he noticed movements in the crops.Now it was on the northern side of the field, moving towards him.The girl emerged from the field, looking directly at the boy and waved.The boy dropped to the floor, hoping the girl had not seen him.When he rose up and peeked out the window, the girl had started down the road, beginning her long walk to school.And so the cycle repeated for 12 days.Every afternoon the boy found the girl in the field, talking to the scarecrow, shooing away the brazen black birds.
10:42He watched her until the sun fell.The next morning, he saw her asleep,and the farmer crossing the field to stuff two more handfuls of straw into the scarecrow's shirt.The girl woke up, inspected the scarecrow, walked straight out of the field,and waved at the boy's window.At school he tried making eye contact, but she seemed not to notice him,or anyone for that manner.She walked the halls with her chin down.
11:19At recess, she sat alone on the swing set.By the time Halloween came,the corn plants across the road had turned brown and dry.And when the boy looked closely,he could see the ears tucking the self back,revealing bright yellow and coves.When his family left to trick up,retreat. The boy stayed behind and watched the girl as she looked after the scarecrow.
11:50Just after sunset, she looked back at him. She faced him and stared at length,performatively, as if to ensure that he was watching. Then she reached up to the nearest stock,yanked a cob off its stem, and took a bite. Remembering his father's,warning about eating the raw corn.The boy dropped his binoculars and ran downstairs.Frantically, he searched the kitchen and living room for someone to tell.As if he didn't know the house was empty,he returned to the window and scanned the shadowy field,
12:33hoping not to find the girl.But the binoculars landed on her easily,as if magnetized to her.Her chewing had become sloppy and eager.She dropped the calm before I reached the ground, had already yanked another from its stem.She opened the husk and ran her teeth over it like an animal.The boy's case oscillated between the dark window and the empty bedroom doorway.He looked to the porch below him, the two-lane street,
13:07envisioning his path but not expecting to take action.Across the road,The impending storm blew gusts of hot and cold they yanked the plants left and right,as if they shook their heads known, urging the boy to stay inside.He looked through the binoculars a final time.The girl stella ate the corn rabinously.With shaking hands, he places binoculars on his dresser.He descended the stairs slowly, gripping the railing tightly.
13:40Suddenly, he was in his shoes and his coat.He stepped out the front door and closed it quickly behind himself before he had a chance to change his mind.When he reached the edge of the field, he stopped for a moment, looking from one end of the empty road to the other,praying for someone to come along and stop him.Tell him to go home and eat candy.No one did.So the boy walked forward.By the time he reached the scarecrow, night had fallen.
14:20The boy had found the girl lying flat next to a puddle of vomit.As he knelt beside her, he heard the crisp rustle of leaves behind him.A strong grip fell on his shoulder.The boy screamed.The girl lived on the plot next to him.to the farm. She asked very few questions. She found herself constantly bewildered by her environment,and by people that surrounded her. Children at school, the way they lined up in disorganized clusters,the bizarre words they exchanged, the fireflies at the edge of the meadow,
15:07blanking their secret codes at one another at dusk.After years of being perplexed by all species, she had come to be surprised by nothing.So when she arrived home from school weeks before Halloween and found an empty house,the girl was not overly startled.She saw the red skid mark on the kitchen floor, undulating and vanishing down the basement staircase,and registered it as odd, but not odder than the room.the magnets on the fringe, or the color of the crochet robin which hung from the curtainrod.
15:49After preparing herself a snack, she walked to her bedroom and found the farmer waiting in the rockingchair in the corner of the room, clocking his presence.She sat on the bed across from him.The farmer asked if the girl knew who he was.She said she had seen him before, circling the farm in his truck.but she did not know his name.As the girl ate her snack,the farmer explained that her mother and father were gone.
16:24They had become trapped within the scarecrow that stood at the center of the cornfield.He said that if the girl tended to the scarecrow every day,averting the birds and keeping her parents company,its stuffing would grow steadily in the days leading up to Halloween.The fuller the scarecrow became,He said, the closer her parents return.The farmer paused, letting his words settle into the girl's brain.He leaned back heavily in the rocking chair creaked beneath him.
17:03His eyes were tired, inanimate, and fixed on the girl.He asked the girl if she had noticed the boy across the room.She nodded.She was far too observant to have never spotted the boy.He was pale and small for his age, and often tried to make himself even smaller.He was just as strange as the other children at school, but in a more timid way.He joined the clusters of classmates and laughed at their jokes.But not because he wanted to.
17:42To the girl.His actions seemed to be more of a camouflage.than of an active participation.He clustered and laughed because to not do so would make him abnormally visible.At home he spent most of his time looking out the window with a pair of binoculars.The farmer told her that that boy was the key to freeing her mother and father.If he was brought into the field to stand before the fully stuffed scarecrow at the lastminute of October, then he would be swallowed up, and the girl's parents would be released.
18:29The father told the girl to walk to the edge of the field every morning and wave at the boy.The girl finished her snack and retrieved a pitchfork from the barn.As she walked through the rows of corn, her belches tasted like peanut butter and banana.When she reached the scarecrow, she lifted the pitchfork into the air and planted it firmly in the dirt.She sat at the edge of the small clearing, looked up at the featureless face of the scarecrow, and recounted her day.She spoke to her parents about her art project, her science quiz, about the farmer that she had met in her bedroom,and about the red stain on the kitchen floor.And after an hour or two, her parents started to speak back.
19:26The face of the scarecrow remained still, as it had no mouth to speak from.And the girl did not precisely hear the voices with ears, but she heard them nonetheless.Just as clearly as she heard the calls of the crows.and their presence strengthened her resolve.She tore the pitchfork from the ground and stood vigilant,ready to protect her parents as the farmer had directed.And that's how the girl spent her next 12 days.She sat in the shadow of the crops,
20:07telling her parents about her time at school.She dispelled the crows until her shoulders ached from holding the pitchfork.and the moon was high above her.Then she fell asleep at the scarecrow's feet.She woke up every morning and found that the scarecrow had gained slightly more stuffing than the day before.She said goodbye to her parents, walked at the edge of the field, waved at the boy across the road, and set off for school.When she returned home, she often found the farmer sitting on the front porch, waiting for her like a dog.She performed the chores of both of her parents.
20:53She washed the dishes, fed the chickens, and swept the barn.Then she headed towards the center of the field,where the scarecrow and the pitchfork waited for her.Throughout it all, the farmer watched.The only time his eyes were not on her was when he excused himself to the basement.where the roaring hiss of power tools rang out from behind the door.The girl found the farmer's behavior bizarre,but she had experiences that were far more unusual.
21:35Once, during a trip to the city,she had seen a silver statue that had come to life.It stood perfectly still at the center of town square,hiding its aliveness.The girl seemed to be the same.the only one who had noticed when it blinked. Halloween came and the farmer gave the girl a finalset of instructions. She trotted out to the center of the field in the afternoon. A scarecrow,which was now so densely stuffed, the straw poked out from beneath its sleeves and collars,
22:14stood tall above the brown mature crops. Overhead, a cloudy sky threatened rain. The crowsswept over the area in a coordinated maneuverous.Kong stubbornly as the girl, as she attempted to bat them off the arms of the scarecrow.It was as if the birds were trying to warn her of something.At sunset, the girl squinted at the boy's window.She could barely perceive his figure crouching behind the glass.He had skipped trick-or-treating, just as the farmer said he would.This was one of the weirdest behaviors she'd seen from a child her age,
23:02but she supposed that she had skipped too.Once the air was fully dark,and the crickets chirped at the edge of the forest.The girl turned to the north side of the field,stared at the boy's window.Then she reached up for the nearest cob and plucked it from its stem.Its husk was slimy,and its smell was an odd combination of earth,
23:30and noxious, she took a bite. To her surprise, her teeth cut easily through the chafe,and the colonels burst eagerly with oozing sweetness. She hadn't had a snack after schoolwhen she swallowed, an intense hunger activated in her stomach. She took most of theCob and six voracious bites, dropped it to the ground and reached for another.She had nearly finished it when she felt an intense burning in her gut.Suddenly, the girl fell to her knees and hot vomit spewed from her mouth.Her stomach lurched more than a dozen times, ringing itself like a sponge.The girl rolled onto her back and found no stars in the night sky.
24:29Only bulbous rolling clouds.She fell asleep.The boy wheeled through the tall crops because it was Halloween night.He blamed this night as he ran.Any other night the boy would have crashed down the stairs and found at least one adult,waiting to accept the burden of the poison girl across the road.Another night he may not have left his room.After all, seeing the girl in the field, he may have backed away from the window until he reached his bed, jumped in and shielded his eyes with the covers.
25:17As if the outside world was nothing more than a scary movie, it had been the smell of Halloween itself that it brought him out.His breath was out of his control.As were his feet.The ground left closer as he stumbled.and his ankle bent painfully.But he narrowly regained his balance.He had been running since he slipped from the farmer's arms.He didn't know how long ago that was,
25:52if the farmer was chasing him,or if he was headed in the right direction,and had only just dawn on him that home was his destination.He looked at his feet and saw the rows of rootssurpassing him perpendicularly.He was headed either east or west.Home was north.He stopped.
26:20His eyes closed in a wince,waiting for the farmer who might have been right on his heels to grab him.All he felt was the heave of his own breath.He opened his eyes.He could hear nothing but heavy bundles of dropping windthat walloped him like a dive-bombing murder of crows.The night was black and moonless.But lightning was beginning overhead,
26:52providing light in the flashes.The boy stood on tiptoes and was barely able to see over the shortest of the plants.The sky lit for only a moment.And the boy saw two straw hats.One two's right, dozens of feet away.and another one to his left, closer.He could not distinguish the farmer's hat from the scarecross.His heels dropped to the ground and he steadied his breath.
27:27Then he raised himself up once more.And for several moments saw nothing but darkness.A flash of light ran over the crops.And he quickly gathered the image of both hats in his mind.The one to his right bent softly against the wind.The one to his left was moving nearer.The boy slunk across several rows to his rightand ran between the two tilted mounts towards the scarecrow.
28:04Hoping his house stood just beyond its clearing.Lighting lit his way in flurries.But between strikes the field was even darker than before.He held his arms out in front of him, felt leaves cruise past his hands.Then, without warning, the line of plants ended.Lightning struck.He was in the small parcel of Flatland.The scarecrow floated above him.
28:39The girl lay on the ground unconscious.Another bolt of lightning and two boots.appeared to his left. The farmer reached for him, and the world went dark again. The girl woke upas soon as the first raindrop hit her forehead. The searing ache in her stomachengrossed upon her focus. She rolled onto her side and felt a chill run over her abdomenand upper spine, in the darkness. She saw three dark figures.The farmer, kneeling with his back, turned to her.The boy, flat on his stomach, shoulders jumping with his panic breath, as his hands were being tied together by the farmer.
29:34And the scarecrow, watching, stealing itself against the rushing wind.Gently, the girl rose to her feet.The wind died only.for a moment, and she could hear the boy's hopeless whimpers.The sky lit with lightning, and his eyes fell upon her, red and wet with tears.She looked up to the face of the scarecrow, whispered at it, so the farmer couldn't hear.She waited and waited, but no response.The burlap face only watched, as the farmer.
30:18were tightened knots around the boy's arms and legs.The girl remembered the blind on the floor, sounds that came from the basement, and she startedto cry too.But then the head of the scarecrow swiveled in the darkness to the face of the girl.One finger on its right hand reached out for her, as if to wipe her tears.its sleeve caught on the cross beam from which it hung. It ripped itself savagely from the wood.It freed its left arm, and then its waist and then its legs. One at a time, lightning struck,and the girl saw the scarecrow standing in the sprinkling rain, facing her, its head tilted
31:13in wonder. The farmer's head turned slightly. His head turned slightly. Hisback pocket crinkled, and he removed a plastic bag from it. He placed the bag gently over the boy'shead and began fastening a rope around his neck. The scarecrow turned to the boy. Its head straightened,then tilted in the opposite direction. It stepped forward, ready to swallow the boy.Release her parents.The girl reached out and grabbed its hand in the dark.She felt its gaze fall upon her.She shook her head.
32:01She whispered.No.She watched the scarecrow turned slowly away from her.It wrapped its hands around the pitchfork,which slid easily from the quickly softening soil.It took a lunging step towards the girlAnd circled her and stood over the crouching farmerIn the dark
32:27The girl watched as the scarecrow's leather hands gripped the neckThe pitchfork tightlyAnd drove the tines into the farmer's backBones cracked and tissue squelchedThe farmer choked loudlyHis hands felland the boy wiggled his chin out from beneath the plastic bag.The sky light up again and the girl saw the back of the farmer's shirt become soaked with blood.
32:59She stood closer than she thought she had.Close enough to feel the heat radiating from his wound.She looked up.The scarecrow's dark shape had vanished.Over her shoulder.She found it in the same spot that it had been since she had first seen it weeks ago.It watched from high above her, secured tightly again to its beams.She looked down.
33:33Her knuckles shone brightly in a flash of lightning.Her fingers squeezed the shaft of the pitchfork.The blades were still lodged between the farmer's ribs.She felt the quivering.chaos of his heartbeat thumping against the handle. The farmer stood and the pitchfork slipped fromthe girl's hands. He turned to face her and she fell into the wet soil. She gathered herself.He swung an open hand at her. She dipped beneath his arm. In the darkness, the handle of thepitchfork found her and she grabbed it yanked down as hard as she could the farmer screamed falling to his knees
34:27she removed the pitchfork from the back held it high and then lodged it in him again the girl stabbed the back of the farmer until he lay still she knelt next to the boy and started working on the knots ofroom. First she untied the one around his wrists, then his ankles. Soon as his legs came free,the boy stood up, ripped the bag from his face and ran towards the edge of the field. The girlwiped her sweaty face with her palms, and the blood of the farmer warmed her cheeks againstthe cold of October. She walked to the opposite edge of the clearing and sat down.letting the rain wash hershe spoke to the scarecrowbunny did not speak back
35:25she did not find thisparticularly unordinarythanks jimmy i think i needed thathow about yougot a storyafter all these years do you really need to aski don't knowmaybe i should save it for the open mic just in case
35:51come onHave it your way.This one's about the neighborhood that wasn't there.By the time we realized there was something wrong with the neighborhood,we'd already been there for 20 minutes.That was a part I kept thinking about afterward.Not the houses, not the people.Not even what happened to us.
36:23It was the fact that none of us thought anything was strange at first.Hindsight's weird like that.How is it so easy to brush off obvious warning signs in the moment?It was Halloween.We were 15, which meant we were old enough to think we were too old for trick-or-treatingand young enough to do it anyway without too much issue.There were five of us, me, Tyler, Megan, Chris, and Lauren.We'd spent most of the night wandering around town in our bargain-bin costumes,
36:58collecting candy from houses we'd visited every year,elementary school, but mostly just tried to aim for the houses where people left a bowlon the front step. We weren't dicks about it, stealing more than our share. It's just easier thanhaving to deal with the occasional glare or passing comment about being a little too old for this.Around nine, when the crowd had mostly thinned out and a lot of the houses were turning offlights. Tyler suggested we go further out. He'd heard about a subdivision on the other side,of the old quarry road where the houses were huge, and then people supposedly gave out full-sizedcandy bars. Not exactly the most common thing back then. None of us had actually been over there,
37:42but figured what better time to check it out. We cut through a wooded trail behind the baseball fieldsand followed an old service road downhill. The moon was bright enough that we didn't needflashlights. This was in the days before cell phones and cell phone lights. The leaves had mostlyfallen, leaving the trees looking like skeleton silhouettes against the sky.One moment we were in the woods, feeling completely alone.In the next moment, the trees opened up revealing a neighborhood.I remember feeling relieved, but I sure as hell wasn't going to say anything about that atthe time out of fear looking lame.
38:19There were streetlights, sidewalks, cars parked in driveways,porch lights glowing orange and yellow.every single house was decorated for Halloweenthat should have been a signeven our neighborhood wasn't completely decoratedprobably one out of every four or five houseswas completely bare with no lights on or pumpkins on the stepshindsight
38:47at the time it looked normalthat's why we kept walking into this neighborhoodand none of us knew none of us had even been toMust have been a new development.The whole area was being built up, so it made sense.And we were 15.Not exactly plugged into the city planning scene.The houses were close together.
39:10Some were modest ranch style.Some were two-story colonials.One looked like an old Victorian that had been dropped into the middle of it all.Seeing something like that now would have been all kinds of red flags.New developments are usually overpriced cookie cutter.shit designed to look impressive, but built as cheaply and uncreatively as possible.I mean, I remember a few years ago my wife and I were looking for a new house, and we wentinto a new development.
39:36Talking with the main office, they seemed proud that you could choose from one of five facadesto really make it your own.That was five slightly different variations on the exact same house, starting at 400K.But that development we were trick-or-treating in.Hollow Brook Lane from the signs was different.Every porch had decorations and every porch light was on,and every front door was open.Not unlocked, I mean open.
40:10Wide open.Our pace slowed a lot at this point,and walking up to that first house took about as long as it had taken us to walk from our own neighborhood.We didn't need to knock or ring a doorbell,because there was already a lady standing there,just inside the doorway. She was dressed as a nurse, just a classic costume, not a revealingone or anything, which might be impossible to find anymore, complete with white uniformand a little paper hat. She looked about 50, and her smile was enormous. I can't emphasize
40:45that enough. It was so big, part of me wondered if her actual costume was a character fromthat Soundgarden song, Black Hole Sun. She held out a candy,bowl as we walked up. Her eyes never leaving us. We said trick or treat, but she just stood there,holding the bowl as we took one each. Then she pointed inside the house, hooking a thumb over hershoulder like a hitchhiker. A couple of us let out awkward laughs, not really knowing what elseto do, short of running away from the house completely. I think it was Chris who spoke up and thanked herwhile sort of ushering us to move away. But she shook her head and pulled her. But she shook her head andpointed inside again, moving to the side to make space for us.
41:30I don't think any of us said anything at that point and just sort of shook our heads as wewalked away quickly.She was still staring as I looked back over my shoulder, but her massive smile was gone,replaced by an exaggerated frown, like something you'd see from a mime or something.Once we were out of earshot, we all started to laugh uncomfortably in comment on how creepythat was.Laughter sort of let the tension out, and we moved on to the next house.And there, the same thing happened.
42:03An old man dressed like the Monopoly Man holding out a bowl before pointing into his house.A young couple dressed like Popeye and olive oil.A teenage girl dressed like a zombie cheerleader.A woman dressed like Wilma holding a baby dressed like pebbles.Every single one had a smile and a bowl of candy waiting.Every single one pointed inside of their house inviting us in,and every single one looked visibly disappointed when we refused.At first we laughed it off, but by the fifth or sixth house,
42:38we weren't laughing anymore and decided we'd had enough.The full-sized candy bars weren't worth whatever weirdness this place had going on.We turned and walked back toward the street sign.The road seemed longer than before.After several minutes, we still hadn't gotten back to the path we'd walked in on.I think that was around the time I heard Megan sniffle, holding back tears.There was something wrong in the air, and we all just wanted to be home, even if no one said it out loud.House after house, every porch was occupied.
43:13Every door was open with someone standing just inside with a bowl of candy.Nobody came out any further than their doorway.Nobody chased us.They just stood there, and we were.watched us. If we made eye contact, they'd motioned their hand in some way, trying to wave usinside their house. We just kept walking because that's all we could do, until we finally reachedanother street that branched off of Hollowbrook Lane. The sign simply read, welcome home.We followed it because we didn't know what else to do, but the road ended in a cul-de-sac
43:49big enough for 12 houses. Every single house had children.standing on the porch, dozens in total.Some look our age, some were little kids, all of them dressed in various costumes.None of them moved.And honestly, that felt even more terrifying than the adults not moving.They just stood there, staring at us.After a few moments, all at once, they raised their right arms, not waving, pointing, behind us.Then on cue, we all turned around at the same time to see that the adults from the houses we passed were standing in the street behind us.
44:3130 or 40 of them all gathered behind us without our noticing.They weren't smiling anymore.I think it was Tyler who whispered that we should run, and we did.We ran right past the adults.Not one even motion toward us.And somehow that made things feel that much worse.We reached the end of the street and realized we were just.standing in front of the first house we'd approached, the nurse's house. She was still standing
44:59there, waiting. Only this time she wasn't holding a bowl. She was holding a bunch of small paperbags, like cold lunch bags. She bent over and placed them one by one on the porch. Five of them,one for each of us. Then she stepped aside. The inside of the house was completely dark. The nurseswept her arm toward the darkness, beckoning us.Oh, hell no, we took off running.If we weren't technically lost before, we sure as hell have found ourselves lost soon after.The neighborhood seemed enormous, and was completely walled off.We tried turning down streets, cutting through yards.
45:43We would have jumped fences, but each house had massive security fencing around their backyards,and given what had already happened, none of us wanted to know what they were keepingback there. Every house we ran past had another person on the porch. At first they would just wave ustoward their open door, but quickly they started to get more frantic, all while smiling, that horrible,painful smile, their eyes pleading to us about something we didn't understand. They'd flail theirarms, trying to get our attention, trying to get us to come closer, but we refused to stop.Somehow, eventually, we found our way out of the neighborhood and back to the woods. It wasn't until weout a site of the development to ensure that no one was following this that we sort of collapsed
46:26against each other, panting and sweating and crying, but desperately trying to hide it.We even laughed, sort of, forced in that way teens do to try and hide how scared we reallywere. We talked as we made our way back to the neighborhood, trying to make sense of what we'djust seen. None of us even entertained the idea that it was some kind of prank or that we'dwandered into a new kind of Halloween haunt attraction.That would have been stupid for all kinds of reasons.No.We knew it was real.
47:03It just didn't make sense.That's when Tyler, who'd been really quiet since we've gotten a hell out of there, chimed in.He said as much to himself as to any of us that maybe they wanted us to come inside their homes to replace them.That maybe the people there were trapped.and that the candy was there to lure people in.But maybe the kids were there because their parents were trapped,but it was different for them.And that's why they tried to warn us.
47:33None of us said much in return,each of us thinking about the potential implications of any of it.I tried not to think about what way to happen if any of us or all of ushad walked into one of those houses.I just kept seeing those horrible smiles.I kept seeing the pain.behind their eyes, like we were some lifeline to them.We were an escape.
47:57We were so close and we kept running away.A life preserver just beyond the reach of your fingertips.We never really talked about that night again.I think once or twice one of us tried to mention the development friends at school,but we were always met with exactly what you would assume.What development?That's not to say that it isn't.there. It is. But not one of those houses is occupied. Never have been. The official story
48:31as I came to understand it was that the development was built and that then there was somekind of financial scandal and issues with permits and blah, blah, blah. The end result wasan entire neighborhood built and abandoned. The road in was never officially finished and endedup being reclaimed by the trees. I guess the houses are still there to this day.But you'll never get me to go back there.Not for a million dollars.Because if the houses are still there, then maybe the people are still there.The people that no one else believes are there.
49:07But I know are there.Waiting.Waiting for someone to finally take their place.I think that's it for me tonight.Oh, really?All good things, Jimmy.All good things.For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration,
49:43please 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 Commons Share-A-like licensing,or with written consent from the authors.No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcastor otherwise distributedwithout the express written consentof the creepy podcast production team
50:13and the story's author.
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