Creepy - Day 25 - Christmas Crap & Children of the Fold

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Christmas Crap***Written by: Deirdre Coles and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***Children of the Fold***https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Creepy presents the 31 days of horror. Day 25. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastors and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or our simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Okay, so just sit here and talk to myself totally normal.

Just like recording a story. Except that someone is going to analyze it and try to figure out why I'm going crazy. And not just me, but everything. everyone that I work with. Yup. Just a normal day at work. Nothing to see here. I mean, I have to be going crazy.

It's freaking October and I'm having dreams about Christmas crap. The drugstore where I work does a thriving business. Unfortunately for my boss, that business is the one that takes place in our back parking lot, where Dan Darnel and a few of his people spend most of their days. Inside, where the drugs are legal, things are considerably slower. Fourth Street pharmacy doesn't just sell prescriptions. We sell everything from overpriced low-quality soap to over-price, low-quality toys, because that's where the profit margin is.

That's according to my boss, Chad, the manager, who, by a remarkable coincidence, is also the owner's son. Fourth Street is always just one of Chad's brilliant ideas away from making it big, by which I mean breaking even. His latest scheme was the worst yet. Our rinky dink Halloween merchandise was barely moving. One of those pop-up costume stores opened up a couple of towns over, and anyone with any sense went there instead of shopping our wares.

So now, barely into the month of October, Chad decided to get a jump on selling Christmas. My heart sank when I saw him on his knees, digging through boxes in the seasonal aisle, trying to cram more stuff onto their already crowded shells. He handed me a figurine of an angel, who was actually kind of slutty-looking, and she started chirping a carol,

that somehow triggered a chain-dragging ghost on the next shelf to play what was supposed to be spooky music. Just to join the fun, I groaned out loud while I shoved in more and more ornaments. When I was done, I stood back and looked at our seasonal aisles. I cannot emphasize this enough. Orange and black and purple and red and green do not go well together. I was looking at tetanicolor clown vomit, sprinkled heavily with glitter.

But the overstuffed shelves weren't just assaulting my eyes. The cute little call-in response routine where an animatronic Christmas item triggered a motion-detecting Halloween item and vice versa kept going on and on. Even when I left the aisles to work the register, I could hear the jingling, screaming, caroling, howling, cacophony going on and on. Most of the cheap garbage chad orders runs out of batteries within minutes. But this lot seemed to be an exception.

It was Saturday, so the pharmacy was closed. Dr. Hendricks, a man so judgmental that I would literally have to be shooting blood from my eyes like a horny toad before I placed a prescription with him, was not in. He wouldn't have tolerated all this noise. But it was just me and chat, so I knew there was no point asking him to make it stop. Although the sounds wanted to make me clean out my ears with a very, very sharp pencil, I couldn't help but notice how the rancers. random overlapping and clashing noises sounded almost like words. I suppose that any series of random sounds could have that effect, kind of like the infinite monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare theorem.

But this sounded almost like chanting, and the chanting had an effect. Look, I'm not saying that we accidentally summoned a demonic entity via the electronic squeals of our crappy Christmas and Halloween decorations. Which interwove to create the sounds of an arcane language unspoken by human tongue for uncountable thousands of years. But I'm not not saying that. Things started to get weird, quick. Jane Collins, my least favorite customer, bought a giant bag of Halloween candy because, she said, she got more trick-or-treaters every year.

Five minutes later, she came storming back into the store yelling because one of the pieces of candy, which she immediately started eating at her car, had turned out to be a lump of coal. Chris Moser started yelling before she even got out of the store, because, she said, it was in horribly bad taste to try to sell a nativity scene starring a zombie baby Jesus. It wasn't long after that before the demon walked in. I didn't have a second of a doubt about who or what she was. Candy apple, red hair, lipsticks and nails to match.

She had the rough outlines of a youngish woman, but seeing her in person, you could tell she was about as human as a lamprey eel. Chad and I both froze in place, watching her. She surveyed our store with pure disdain before walking over to the seasonal aisles. She flicked the nylon witch hat with one long finger. We've tolerated this travesty for a long time, she said, because even when you make a mockery of the tradition, every kind of celebration feeds our power.

But this. She flicked a finger at a drunken-looking Santa ornament and a crumbled to ash at her touch. This won't do. And then she turned to us. There are thousands upon thousands of stories and myths and legends about fay and demonic and supernatural beings from the dawn of history, from every culture on earth.

The one thing all the stories seem to agree on is that the fay are a bunch of pissy bitches, and now we'd gone and offended one. Chad was an idiot, but he had a coward's instinct to sense a superior predator. That was why he'd never told Dan Darnale to clear out of the back parking lot, and let him use our Wi-Fi on our bathroom, and, occasionally, openly shoplifted when the mood took him.

So Chad was scared, but I wasn't. I read the kind of horror and fantasy books that Chad sneered at. I was terrified. But I was a little distracted by something I caught out of the corner of my eye, a chubby little reindeer fawn statue. It must have been a weird fear-based response, but I couldn't help thinking that I wanted it. With its tiny muzzle and chubby cheeks,

it was actually really cute. I could buy it right now and put it on my dresser when I got home. You know, ironically. I vaguely heard the front door bell as some new customers came in. A few jingling bells would be cute to hang up by my desk. And really, with my employee discount, I could go ahead and get a few more decorations now. Maybe a lot of decorations.

How fun for my parents when they got home. My hand was starting to float towards the little range, dear when Jane Collins, back yet again, snatched it up, and Deb Morris grabbed it right out of her hand, yelling that she had her eye on it first, and Jane was taking it just to spite her. The aisles were suddenly full of customers, and they were grabbing items off the shelves and cramming them into their arms until they were spilling out onto the floor. They were trying to grab things away from each other and screaming insults in each other's faces. A small crowd gathered around Chad, yelling at him to try to get him to take their size as they squabbled for products.

Two men both grabbed a hold of a polar bear stuffy wearing a Santa hat and pulled until it tore, spraying white stuffing like snow on everybody in the aisles. It snapped me out of my inquisitive trance, and suddenly I got what was going on. Chad had wanted to prove to his dad that the store could be a success, and the demon was granting his wish in Monkey Paw's style, making people so desperate to spend that they were clawing each other's eyes out. Typical demon bullshit. The frenzy also reminded me of the midpoint between Halloween and Christmas,

the worst day of the year for anyone in customer service. Black Friday. It was kind of clever, I thought distantly, as I watched Chris Moser grab Jane Collins by the hair, yank her head back and then slam her face into the edge of a shelf. The two polar bear men were also trading punches, and I felt something bounce off my arm and onto the floor. It was a tooth. Ew.

I started to slink away towards the back of the store. I glanced over at Chad. He was surrounded. One of the customers had grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and was screaming in his face, shaking him back and forth. He looked dazed and boneless, like maybe the back of his head had already whacked together. against the N-cap behind him a few times. I didn't dare glance anywhere near the Halloween demon. I slipped backwards into our stockroom slash office

and turned to head out the back door. Normally, I wouldn't go out this way, through the open-air drug market, but it was better than the alternative. I was opening the door when I caught sight of something on Chad's grungy little desk. It was a picture of his dog. God damn it.

Cody's dumb little face made me think of all the times I'd seen Chad walking him, petting him, driving around town with his little snout poking out the window. Cody would be heartbroken if Chad didn't make it out of here. I sighed. There are dumber reasons for risking your life and or immortal soul trying to save someone. So instead of trying to slink around the side of the building, I walked straight toward Dan Darnell. I figured he knew a thing or two about dealing with customers.

who were losing their shit entirely. How I was going to convince him to help? Well, that was a bridge I would have to cross when I came to it, and realized there was no bridge, and I was going to have to jump a ravine or something. It took me a minute to realize that Dan had problems of his own. He was surrounded by a throng of eager customers, and he was yelling that, dude,

no way you have enough money for all that, and no, he wasn't going to gift wrap a goddamn thing, and no, he wasn't throwing in free candy cane, and they must all be out of their minds. He frowned when he saw me approaching. In my Fourth Street pharmacy button-down shirt, I didn't exactly blend in with this crowd. We need your help, I said. We have a problem. In fact, I think we have the same problem. It was hard to have a conversation between the people begging, crying, yelling, pulling at Dan's clothes, threatening to kill Dan, and threatening to kill me for distracting him.

But finally, I managed to explain the demon summoning. Dan sighed. I thought it might be something like that, he said. He managed to shove the people nearest him back a little, then turned and threw a handful of tiny baggies out into the parking lot. Half the crowd swarmed towards them like hungry seagulls. The other half followed us as we booked it back inside the pharmacy, just managing to slam and lock the back door against them.

We had a fast and frantic brainstorming session. It turned out that Dan had read a lot of the same horror and fantasy books that I had. Although, I guess I couldn't really think of them as fantasy anymore. And we came up with a plan. It was a terrible plan, and it shouldn't have worked. And it wouldn't have, except that when we headed back into the store, full of even more customers fighting even more violence,

there was an even louder commotion at the front. The drug-seeking crowd from the back parking lot, who had circled around the building in search of Dan, burst through the front door. The demon turned towards them, smirking, and we attacked. Dan grabbed her face between his huge hands, and kissed her full on the lips, blowing a lung full of vaped marijuana smoke into her mouth.

Meanwhile, I stabbed her with two syringes at once and press the plungers down. Before we had emerged, I unlocked Dr. Hendricks' pharmacy room and scrambled around back there, feeling a kind of sick glee at how absolutely apeshit Dr. Hendricks was going to be

when he saw the place on Monday morning, if the entire store hadn't burned to the ground before then. Of course, there was no way any medication could actually work instantaneously, not if we were dealing with anything halfway human. But demons were all about, symbol and intent. They could be constrained by chalk circles and lines of salt and sigils on doorways. Demons manipulate humans through vanity or lust or gluttony or greed, but they were all

different aspects of the same thing. Demons, at their core, are all about appetite. And I had just injected this one with a massive quantity of semaglutide. Appetite? Suppressed. I would like to think we struck a mighty blow against the forces of evil, but she just rolled her eyes and then seemed to decide she couldn't be bothered. She stomped away, but I noticed that she wobbled a little bit when she did. Once she left, people slowly stopped fighting, looking dazed. Dan Darnell walked over to where Chad was slumped on the floor, a lot worse for where. Dan extended his hand and the two men exchanged a look before Dan pulled Chad to his feet.

I looked around. The store was absolutely trashed. Shattered glass and plastic and a whole lot of blood. Customers avoided each other's eyes, while they unclinched their hands to let Hanks have pulled out hair and mangled ornaments fall to the floor. You know, I just don't think I'm cut out for retail. Why am I so lucky? It's not like everyone else has been having to share their dreams so much. Don't worry. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything. Jesus?

No, it's just me, Nurse Natalie. Were you listening this whole time? No, I just turned on the speaker when you put your face in your hands and seemed to be muttering about something. I thought maybe the door got stuck. Oh. No, I'm fine. Just tired. I completely understand.

Well, if it makes you feel better, there are some donuts in the aqua therapy room. Donuts in the pool room? That just feels wrong. Are there any old-fashioned donuts left? Yep. Yummy. I feel as though I should offer an apology for my behavior. I can't say that I've ever been one to monologue before,

and I don't think it's come across as very professional. I will do better to contain my excitement. However, it isn't without its benefits. Your brainwaves have shown better interaction to the drug when mixed with social interaction. It appears that trying to maintain a control has actually slowed our progress. Historically, we should have known better.

Back in the 13th century, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II carried out an experiment whereby infants would be raised without human interaction. In an attempt to determine if there was, as he put it, a natural language. It was his theory that this language was one that God had imparted on Adam and Eve. and our own human languages had caused it to be lost. The children did not survive. But you survived. And these last few days, you've thrived. Your EEG this morning showed a persistent theta pattern

with intrusions in the gamma band for the second day in a row. The fact that we've been able to replicate that has been nothing short of thrilling. Science is, at its core, the study of reproducible phenomena. Jenner observed matter-of-fact correlations and derived prophylaxis. Pasteur took rot and turned it into the understanding of sterilization and immunity. Fleming noticed an accident and by attending to it saved millions. Curie endured exposure and refined a dangerous power into useful technology. They, and so many more, subjected themselves to long nights, awkward failures, and unpopular philosophies.

They listened when the world whispered anomalies in their ear. But you hear different whispers now, don't you? Tell me about those whispers, you hear. Don't resist. It will only prolong the pain. I hear. I hear. The children of the fold.

You won't believe me, but I need to say it anyway. I need someone to hear this. Because if no one hears it, if no one knows, then maybe I really did vanish with them. Maybe I'm already gone. I'm a surveyor. Land mapping, structural planning, that sort of thing. You know the guys on the side of the road during construction,

looking through that little camera-looking thing on a, tripod. That's me. Oh, and it's called a total station, if you care. A few months ago, I took a contract from a private forestry company. They were looking to expand a logging operation in a northern zone of a national forest, a stretch so untouched that part of it doesn't even show up on modern maps. Believe it or not, National Forests are logged more than any other public land. And logging in national forests is going up. It was supposed to be simple. Three days in the woods, set up some markers, determining property boundaries, assessing timber volume, and planning logging operations, that sort of thing. I was alone.

I had enough experience that I could choose the jobs I took and the terms. What I didn't know is that I'd walk right into something that shouldn't exist. See, they don't use names, no signs, no roads, just folded trees. That's the first thing I noticed. I was maybe six miles from where I'd parked the truck when the woods started to change. The trees bent in strange ways. Not snapped, not windfallen. Folded.

Like someone had grabbed them at the midpoint and creased them over themselves without breaking them. Some folded once, others twice. Perfect. 90 degree bends, no bark damage, no splinters, just soft angles like the forest was being gently crumpled. I've seen all kinds of strange tree formations before. You name it, I've seen it or heard about it. In osculation, when two trees grow close enough to touch and fuse together, banning trees

that start as seeds that sprout on other trees, as they grow, they send down aerial roots that can become new trunks, eventually forming a huge structure. that can look like an entire forest. The crooked forest in Poland, where all the trees bent sharply to the north before zooming the normal upright growth pattern. No one's quite sure why. Trees that go through fences, wires, other trees, even through rocks.

But this was none of those things. That should have been enough to turn back. But I didn't. I was curious and intrigued, clicking some pictures on my phone. I tried to send them to a collie, but I was in a dead zone. I figured that was fine. It gave me a chance to get some more pictures.

I kept walking. Too curious. Too numb from curiosity, caffeine, and that damp cold air to feel anything even resembling a warning. I found their village about an hour later. It wasn't marked on the map. No roads. Obviously no power lines. Just wooden structures folded into the land side.

escape. Literally, there really is no other way to describe it. In fact, I know that most of how I'll describe what I saw won't make sense, because it doesn't make sense. Not in the physical world that we know. Please bear with me. If my descriptions make you feel confused and uncomfortable, then you'll understand. roofs that curved back into the earth, walls that sloped at perfect angles and rejoined themselves like paper origami made from timber. I've seen plenty of steam-bending videos from woodworking accounts, but this was on a scale like nothing I could imagine. The whole place was dead silent. No birds, no wind, just the sound of my own breath coming out long and slow from the walk. I called out a hesitant to load just once and the sound barely carried, like the air didn't want to move.

I should have left right then, but I walked into the village, and the houses were open. No locks, no doors, just angled entryways. The interiors were symmetrical in the wrong ways. Rooms bent around themselves, hallways leading nowhere. I started to realize they weren't homes. Not really. They were shapes designed to mean something I couldn't quite understand. As if I was standing inside an impossible shape like a penrose triangle or impossible trident come to life.

In one of the houses I found clothes, small ones, children's clothing folded so precisely looked mechanical. Shirts creased along perfect thirds, pants squared in stack like linens, better than any clothing department in any mall ever. There was dust in the folds, thick, undisturbed, and I touched them in years. And that's when I heard it. The first and only sound from that place, a soft clicking, regular, rhythmic. Coming from underground. I found the hatch behind what might have once been a chapel, though it was bent almost flat against the ground.

The hatch was metal, not rusted or locked. I pulled it open without too much effort beyond the weight of the thing. Inside was a ladder descending into darkness. The clicking continued up the tunnel, and it got louder. What can I say? I know I should have run. I know I should have closed it and walked away. But I couldn't.

The world had turned into a surreal dream. I felt stoned like I was back in college again. What should have been important didn't even register. No anxiety, no caution, just a focus on one thing at a time, like it was the most important thing in the world. I needed to know what made that sound. Who had made these people? Buildings.

I tested my weight on the ladder. It was sturdy. The wooden rungs didn't even groan in the least under my weight. It went deep, farther than made sense. Maybe six or seven full stories underground. No lights. Fortunately, I always kept a headlamp with me just in case. As I climbed down, the air changed, grew warmer, wetter.

It smelled like paper left out in the rain. The further I descended, the more I had to get to the bottom. When I finally reached the bottom, I found a tunnel, just tall enough to crouch in, carved from packed earth. The walls were lined with bones, not stacked or dumped, but folded. There's no other way to describe it. I'm sorry. I had to close my eyes a few times,

because I'd suddenly get dizzy looking at them. Femers bent into crescents, ribs curled around each other, skulls crumpled inwards, eye socket squashed like collapsed paper cups. None of this should have been possible. Bones don't bend like that. But these had, cleanly, perfectly.

The tunnel widened into a chamber, maybe 20 feet across. that by dozens of white candles melted into the floor. And in the center of it, I saw the thing they had become. Maybe always were. They weren't people anymore. They had the shapes of people.

Two arms, two legs, heads tilted forward. But their bodies were wrong. Like everything else, they were folded. Not in any way I could have imagined. This wasn't some extreme form of yoga, this transcended flexibility and form. Joints reversed, spines bent in perfect zigzags, fingers tucked into palms and stitched there with something dark and wet. Faces creased down the center, foreheads to chins, like they've been shut closed. Their knees bent sideways.

Some had been folded so many times. Their torsos were no thicker than hands wet. And yet they moved. They twitched, shifted, tilted in unison with insect-like precision. And all the while, that clicking, coming from inside them. Every time they moved, something deep in their joints snapped or locked, like cartilage it turned to hinges. I stood frozen.

They didn't look at me. They didn't have eyes. not anymore, but I felt them watch me, all of them. Then they began to unfold. I don't remember running. I just remember the sound. Joints cracking open like books being slammed shut in reverse. Bones sliding into longer shapes, flesh stretching.

The first one that reached me brushed my arm with what should have been a hand, but it wasn't. It was a folded wing, curled inward and stitched down with veins. The touch felt cold and wet like a reptile, but somehow still burned. It left a smear on my jacket, not blood or fluid, just something gray like liquefied dust. I turned and ran back into the tunnel. I heard them behind me, not stomping or screaming, but clicking in perfect unison. Their bones making a rhythm. like a typewriter from hell.

I climbed the ladder two rungs at a time, light bouncing wildly between looking above me and glancing downward toward their approach. When I got to the top, the ear hit me like stepping into an ice bath. I slammed the hat shut and that sound stopped. No more clicking. No more movement. Just stillness. I didn't go back to the truck right away.

I stumbled through the woods for almost an hour before collapsing against the tree. I tore a protein bar and water bottle out of my pack and almost choked myself drinking and eating too fast. Too panicked. Eventually, I pulled myself together. God, that's such a bad choice of words. I hiked out and drove, numb and silent. Straight through two states. Straight home.

I told my supervisor the side was inaccessible. Dangerous terrain. And added, there was an issue with the boundary being inaccurate. Plenty of reasons not to ever go back there that the logging company wouldn't question too deeply. Thankfully, I was right. No one questioned it, but it didn't end there. Something came with me.

I've started folding things. Not on purpose, I just do it. Napkins, towels, receipts, pages from books, over and over. Perfect thirds. Perfect trying. angles, edges sharp and aligned. Sometimes I don't remember doing it. Sometimes I wake up surrounded by folded shirts, folded socks,

folded sheets of fruit skins peeled in long curling spirals. Worse. My body's changing. My right elbow bends both ways now. There's no pain, just popping. The joint is loosened. My knees creak in the morning My spine ticks when I lean too far

Last week in the mirror I saw a crease forming down the middle of my face Just a shadow Just a hint But it's deeper now Sometimes I catch myself walking sideways through doors Like I'm trying to slide into smaller spaces Like I'm preparing for something

Or somewhere I've started dreaming of them, the folded ones, the underground chamber, the candles flickering and still air. They kneel in rows, creaking and twitching, their heads bent towards something deeper in the tunnel, something I never saw. But in the dream, I feel it watching me, not with eyes, with intent. And now I understand they weren't worshipping a god. They weren't guarding a secret.

They were becoming it, folding their bodies one inch at a time to match its shape. And now so am I. It's getting harder to move like I used to. Work has become more difficult. I have to keep turning down jobs out of fear how people react when they see me. My limbs don't swing right. My back pulls at strange angles.

My shadow is beginning to slant when I stand under light. There's a sound in my ears, faint but steady. Click, click, click, click. Like the countdown of a printer. Like the ticking of film spinning round and round in a projector. Like something preparing to finish the final fold. So I'm telling you this now. Well, I can still speak.

Well, my tongue still fits in my mouth. before it folds itself down my throat, while my bones are still what I know them to be. They call themselves the children of the fold, not born, not converted, rewritten. And if you see the folded trees or hear that clicking beneath the earth, don't go in.

Because once it sees you, you've already started to change. I can't keep doing this. I can only imagine what you must be feeling right now. However, progress does take sacrifice. But please don't worry yourself with these details. Should the least ideal scenario take place and you expire before we are able to complete our testing? I think you should know that it won't be in vain.

Everything you have been through has been in. invaluable. And I am more certain than ever that we will be able to reproduce the result in another subject. Fortunately, we have several who seem as though they could take your place. Hmm, that reminds me. I want... What are you doing? Huh? Oh, uh, sorry, doctor. I was just... Are you watching a video of a turtle grinding against a shoe? Yeah, they make funny noises. I'll deal with you later. For now, I need you to send out a memo.

Of course, doctor. What do you want to say? I want anyone on the staff who may be experiencing unusual dreams or unexpected physical or mental reactions upon waking to notify me immediately. Unusual dreams. Do you think what's going on with him and the others is contagious? Just send the memo. Yes, doctor. I like turtles.

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