Creepy - Day 31 - Graveyard Grub Grab Delivery & 404 Legs

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Graveyard Grub Grab Delivery***Written by: Sarah Sigfried and Narrated by: Michelle Kane***404 Legs***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 31. 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 make. contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.

I'm sorry, I'm late. I really don't have much time to chat. Where is everyone? Oh, hi, doctor. Yeah, the others couldn't make it. What do you mean they couldn't make it? Well, we tried to reach you, but they really couldn't find anyone, so the rest decided to take care of it themselves. Take care of what?

What happened, Michelle? Okay, it's going to take a little while to fully explain, and I think I have to go into a lot of detail for it to really make sense, so I hope you have a lot of time available. It all started when Owen... Never mind. What? I thought you wanted me to tell you what happened.

I'm sure Owen just got himself stuck somewhere again, am I right? Um, actually, yeah. That's kind of part of it. Okay, well, I do have a very important meeting soon. I take it that you slept while last night? Actually, no, I barely slept at all. You didn't? Yeah, I guess the other night was kind of a fluke.

I had this weird dream about graveyard grub-grab delivery. 10.31.22, 8.30 p.m. Order from Peking Chinese takeout. By Mary Graham, one hot and sour soup, one egg roll, one beef fried rice, 1200 Mountain View Road, special instructions, end of driveway. Accept this delivery? I was working part-time doing deliveries for grub-grab while I attended classes at Community College. One Halloween night, my phone screen flashed the notice for this delivery.

My eyes were then blinded in the darkness after I opened the app on my phone to read the notification. This was a small order and wouldn't pay much, but I wasn't far from the restaurant, so I accepted the trip and headed over to Peking. I drove carefully, keeping watch for trick-or-treaters as they scurried across the streets laden with treats. I've seen some interesting things on deliveries, but this one order from Peking surpasses all the weirdness I had seen before, or since. In my delivery, I have seen more dirty underwear, nasty houses, and drug paraphernalia out in the open than I can count. I have also been chased by dogs, an angry goat, and once was threatened by a customer's jealous

spouse. But this order was different, and I have chills talking about it. I usually knew the neighborhoods, but Mountain View Road was not ringing any bells for me. I walked into Peking and asked for the Graham order. That again? The cashier snorted, rolled her eyes and shot me a crooked grin. Have fun. I didn't know what her apparent inside joke was and wanted to ask, but decided to just let it go and take the food. She pushed the bag at me with a smirk.

My GPS found Mountain View Road and led me on a winding road up a hill at the edge of town. I hadn't been on this road and didn't see any houses. I drove slowly and was sure I was lost, or someone was pulling a prank on me. Finally, I came to a driveway with a gate, 1,200 Mountain View Road. I turned onto the road between two gateposts and stopped when I saw what lay beyond this entrance. I had been led to a cemetery. Tune stones in varied shapes and sizes revealed themselves in my headlights. I checked the order again. Yep, right address. I kept creeping along the road, recalling the directions.

End of driveway. Maybe the caretaker or a gravedigger had a craving for egg rolls. Maybe there was a house just out of sight at the end of the cemetery road. I thought about how this would be a weird place to live. A bit morbid, but at least the neighbors were quiet. I drove until I ran out of road. My tires came to rest on the bed of gravel. I had a really bad feeling about this.

Dread crept into the pit of my stomach as I realized I was alone in a cemetery on Halloween night. There was no house, but there was an above-ground tomb. I hit my steering wheel out of frustration. Why did I decide to deliver tonight? Halloween is a good night to stay home and watch scary movies. Speaking of scary movies, I'd watch too many of them and reminded myself as I stared at the tomb that zombies aren't real. Ghosts aren't real. Vampires and ghouls and all the things that go bump in the night are not real. I knew these things with my brain, but the pit of my stomach

begged to differ. I took a deep breath and fought off the eerie feelings. I wondered if I should leave the food or just eat it myself. At least it was prepaid, including a 10% tip. My mood changed from spooked to irritated. I got out of my car and shouted into the night. Good one guys. You got me good. I called out. I'm going to eat this egg roll. I almost expected someone to come out of the trees laughing, or a TV producer to jump from behind a tombstone, and declare that I was on candid camera, or that I had been punked. No one came forward, and I heard only the wrestling of tree limbs and leaves in the gentle wind. I followed the light from my high beams, and I noticed something interesting. I read the nameplates on the tomb. John Graham, 1909 to 1985. Alice Collins

Graham, 1912 to 1993. Mary Graham, 1975 to 1995. Mary Graham was the name on the order. My phone alerted me with a buzz and a flash with another notification. I nearly dropped the phone as it vibrated. My eyes were blinded again from the bright light from the grub-grap screen. You have arrived. Please leave the bag on the steps. I jumped back from the steps. I jumped back from the steps, nearly dropping the takeout bag. I looked away from the screen and closed my eyes for a few moments to reaclimate to the darkness. The gentle night wind blew in the trees, and I almost thought I was hearing a voice on the breeze. I shook my head out of this imaginative state and looked back at the takeout bag. I gently placed it on the step and rushed back to my car. I wanted to stay and

see who was coming for the delivery. I noticed I was breathing hard and my hands were sweaty. I thought I could see figures in the darkness. I blinked and then rubbed my eyes. Nope, I said aloud to myself, deciding I was not going to hang out and find out who was ordering that takeout. I started the car and slammed it into drive. As I neared the road to leave the cemetery, my phone let up again.

I paused to check and found another grub-grab notification from the, the order I had just left on the steps of a tomb. You received an additional $5 tip. Five-star review, prompt and courteous. I wanted to turn around and see if I could catch someone. I also didn't want to see the phantom tipper. I kept my eyes on the road and refused to look in my mirrors. I went back and forth about leaving or going back to check the tomb. A sudden noise made me almost jump out of my skin. I breathed a sigh of relief when the sound registered as an owl. It's only an owl. Chill out. Then a shape came at my windshield. I screamed again and realized it was an owl swooping down. I was done. Ah, hell no, I exclaimed and sped out onto the road, likely leaving tracks.

I had another delivery notice come in for the pizza joint, then for hamburgers, and then I lose track. Because all of these were run-of-the-mill orders to houses, apartments, a police station, and graveyard shift nurses. I didn't like the order for Mary. I had another order from Peking restaurant at closing time, and decided to ask the cashier exactly what she had meant with her, have fun, comment. She looked around us quickly to ensure that no one was listening, and she leaned in. So we've had delivery drivers refuse to go back out there. She began. They go once and they don't go back.

Gee, I wonder why, I remarked. Who orders Chinese takeout to a cemetery? Well, the story goes that Mary died on Halloween in a car crash years ago. The cashier began. My aunt went to high school with her. Mary was supposed to come pick up takeout and meet her friends, but she never made it here. She was buried at Mountain View with her grandparents.

My mind recalled the ages of the other occupants of the tomb. The dates lined up. The cashier continued with her story. So the owner, Chen, told me that every Halloween, until the past few years, a caller with a strange voice called in for takeout under Mary. and never picked it up. Same order that she never picked up the night she died.

The phone call always had a bad connection. What number were they calling from? Shouldn't it show up? I asked. They don't have caller ID here. Cashier rolled her eyes. Anyway, every Halloween, always the same order. Always the same time. 8.30.

Chen always gets the newest person to answer. that call. After Grub-Grab started, she orders from there every Halloween night. Lucky you. I stared at the illuminated menu on the wall behind the cashier. I could remember that same glowing picture of beef with broccoli when I was a child. The image was washed out and unappetizing now. Had we really just talked about a ghost who likes Chinese food and uses online delivery apps? How? I demanded. She shrug. Don't know.

Someone must be paying with a credit card, or else it would get declined. She shrugged again. How does a dead person use a takeout app? I mused out loud. I don't know. Ghost doing ghost stuff? She replied. With that, the phone rang, and she had to get back to work.

The next afternoon, I drove into the cemetery and parked outside the Graham tomb. Something was on the ground by the door. I recognized it. There was the bag I had dropped off last night. I walked over to inspect it further. The red and white cartons inside were empty, and a pair of used chopsticks and a napkin were neatly placed to the side of the cartons. I pulled the paper napkin from the bag and shivered as I saw makeup smeared on it. Heavy foundation makeup, like a corpse might wear, with some equally heavy lipstick in a natural shade. I checked the receipt staple to the bag and was satisfied that this was my delivery from last night. The tomb was the size of a backyard garden tool shed.

It was made of granite and marble and had a peaked roof and a heavy iron door with an open scrollwork window. I walked around the structure. I didn't see any high-speed internet cables. I decided that the cell phone reception from inside would be non-existent. Then I shook my head at the ridiculousness of considering that a dead person is using the internet to order Chinese food. The opening in the door gave me a vantage point to look inside. There I saw three heavy stone vaults. In the floor, inside, I saw a selifane wrapper.

I recognized it. A fortune cookie wrapper. I reached forward and jiggled the handle. To my surprise and horror, the door opened. A noise interrupted me as I stepped inside to take a look. I turned back outside the tomb to see a middle-aged couple with a bouquet of flowers. What are you doing? The man barked at me.

His companion looked at me with suspicion in her eyes. You're not the caretaker, she exclaimed. I bobbed my head in agreement and slinked out of the tomb. No, I'm a delivery driver. For Grub-Grab, I brought food here last night. I explained quickly, not wanting them to think I was some grave robber or worse. Their faces softened from anger to contemplation. They nodded at me.

Mary was our friend. She loved Chinese food. The male explained, clearing his throat. So you guys ordered the food? I asked. This order would be a lot less creepy if they had done it. The couple chuckled. No, she orders it herself every Halloween.

We don't know how. We come the next day and visit her. Halloween was so awful for us after losing her. We don't come then. The take-out bags are always here the next day. The man explained. We take her trash away for her. But how? I squeaked.

They shrugged and looked at one another. The dead can, um, interact with electronics, we think. The woman explained, I decided that next Halloween, I'm going to set up some equipment outside the Graham Toon to detect electronics use. Then I'll monitor the Grub app, deliver her food, and then sit in a vigil to see who actually consumes the meal. I'm not sure if I really want to meet Mary, But hey, I have to know more.

I can't just leave it alone. Yes, that's very interesting. It probably has something to do with your mother. What? Are you serious? That's all your... Enough! For the last month, I've sat here patiently,

holding your hands and analyzing your dreams and trying to help give you insight beyond the two inches in front of your face. But I just don't have time for this anymore. Go find your friends and see if Owen guys, his head out of the slats on the stairs or wherever the hell he got his head stuck this time, and let me get back to matters that are actually important. Wow, that was rude.

Owen? Up here. I thought you were stuck. I was. They greased me up with butter. I'd have been here sooner, but I kept licking my fingers. Why are you even up there? We said we were going to go through that security door that Dr. Hall is always disappearing.

into? Hey, maybe you get a lot of chances to experience diehard, but I don't. I'll meet you guys later. Hippikai. This is for the best. How's it going? Still waiting on JV to bypass the keypad? How do you even know how to do that, JV? Please, just because the packaging is so pretty doesn't mean the box is empty. That doesn't answer the question in the least, but I'm not in a position to judge. Are you sure we even want to do this? We can just walk out the front door. This place has turned into a ghost town. We've lost a month of our lives here

because we thought we were getting help with our dreams, but obviously something else is going on. If you want to leave, go ahead, but I want to know what the hell Dr. Hall is up to. I just know John has something to do with this. You really think he'd be involved in this? I don't know. But maybe Nate's right.

It wouldn't be the strangest thing for us all to walk outside, just to see John there with a sparkler and a banner, and some excuse why he couldn't tell us what was going on this month. I swear, if we get through that door and find John at the middle of all this, I'm going to put such a curse on him. Are we ready? Yes, Doctor, they're on the call right now. I've queued it up in the monitor in the subject's room.

Excellent. After all this work, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining this call. I know that some of you have recently gotten involved in the funding, so for the sake of all here, let me explain the history you have so intelligently decided to be a part of. They called it a myth as long as I have been alive. A fevered tale appearing on the internet about men who would not sleep. sleep and what they became. But myths are how we dress memory. Science is how we strip the costume away. My grandfather began it with the arrogant hubris of his era. The post-war laboratories, sealed chambers,

stimulants tested until the body's rhythms unstitched from themselves. He recorded hours of silence, Then of chatter, then laughter, then the calculus of violence. Officially, the project died on paper, left to be nothing more than rumor and fantasy. Unofficially, it taught us a lesson no grant could ever sanction. Deprive the brain of sleep long enough, and the border between perception and invention thins to a membrane you can pierce. This was where we started. I grew up with cassette tapes in the attic and my grandmother's admonitions against staring too long at the dark.

On those tapes, my grandfather's voice read observations in a dry clinical cadence. I swear I could smell his cigarettes through his recorded words. He wrote in the margins that the subject began to address someone else as if the room contained more than flesh. He marked the days when the subjects stopped bargaining with us and started bargaining with whatever was on the other side. He hid the tapes when the committee came. He and his family fled the same government that had once sanctioned him.

They were afraid of what he had uncovered, and they were right to. Jump forward to right now. I have finished what he could not. Not out of ambition or ego, but out of curiosity sharpened by grief. I speak now as both air and practitioner. Using modern neurostimulants, close-loop mapping, and non-invasive modulation, I have recreated the gateway that is both safer and stranger. We do not simply keep people awake to watch them break.

We prime the cortex. We tune the limbic call and response. We tune the dreamscape like a radio band. The patients we recruit are no longer soldiers and criminals, but the storytellers. The ones who live the waking dreams as their own, one foot always on the other side. What we have learned is both clinical and, at least to the layperson's, terrible.

There is a structure to the phenomena the old guard called madness. The intrusions are not as random as once believed. Repeated motifs, shared architectures, the same faces at the margins of unrelated subjects. The waking reports match the nocturnal logs with an accuracy, That could not be chance. Where my grandfather reported whispers, we now record the exchange. Where he saw mutilation springing from suggestion,

we observe language, forming into strategy, forming into control. The dreamscape is not a private theater, as once believed. It is a topology, an interconnected network, a place,

where something with pattern has started to recognize us in return. Despite what detractors will say, rest assured, our aim is not cruelty. It is transduction. We want to convert experience into dialogue, not domination, for now. We want to induce controlled breaches, so the entities, or whatever ontology you want to assign them, can be queried, mapped, and, if possible, negotiated with. Imagine, for just a moment,

intelligence gathered not from satellites and operatives, but from the numinal seams of the mind. Imagine a lexicon of those seams that could warn us of collective neuroses, of mass and cultural contagions, or even things we are yet to conceive of. Make no mistake, though. There are costs. The subjects do not return unchanged.

This subject, you see before me, may never wake up again. And if so, he will never be the same person he was. Sleep deprivation, compounded with directed resonance, leaves traces. Memories become porous. where at first we had to induce memory failure, the concept of memory is now an abstract for him. Names and faces are forgotten, replaced with melodies that do not exist within our perception. What we didn't know we were missing was a person whose life already walked that thin line. A person so rooted in the nightmare world

That his own perceptions of wake and sleep were blurred A person so obsessed with stories That the stories had started to take over his life And he let it be taken over A person who was then capable of spreading it to others If there is hubris here, it is the oldest version of it The belief that the unknown is a resource to be harvested? But there is method as well as madness.

We suit your protocol onto the ritual my grandfather began. Blind controls, double-blind decoding of nocturnal speech. Cross-validation with non-participants and, of course, replication. For which we have ten more subjects, I believe, are at the verge of testing. Like this subject here. We log everything. We smoke out false positives. We refuse to sensationalize.

This is not for the masses. This is not for ego. This is for the few. And it is for all time. And we cannot turn back. In the quiet hours between sessions when the monitors hiss and the bill, seems to exhale with him. I listen to the playback and hear unmistakably replies not to our questions, but to our presence.

Something on the other side is learning our syntax, just as fast as we are learning it's. So I continue not because I yearn for power, but because I love the question. that I inherited through blood. What happens when the human mind meets a mind that is not human, not animal? When the shared language is not vocabulary but pattern, we are close enough to strike a match, but distant enough to not fully see what it illuminates. My grandfather thought he had seen the end of the experiment, but he had only glimpsed the threshold.

I stand on that threshold now, not to break it down, but to open it wide. And I say, as plainly as I am capable, that if you come with me, you will not return the same. But I speculate that if you are here and still on this call, then same is not what you are interested in. Now I would like to open the floor for some questions. Ah, yes. How will this benefit us? The all-important financial question, of course. To that, I say this. There is no limit to what we can do with this.

Intelligence, reconnaissance, knowledge extraction, emotion engineering, entertainment, performance optimization, surveillance, industrial espionage. Or what my grandfather wanted, more efficient soldiers. We can literally change history whenever we want to suit whatever whim we desire. With this, we control a world that everyone is a part of. that no one else has the keys to enter. How does the process work? Fair question. Ladies and gentlemen, I've arranged a demonstration of results.

We have learned that through his dreams, he speaks for them and to them at the same time, a sort of beacon in the shadows. What significance does him speaking his dreams have? Yes, the dreams themselves. It isn't what he sees as much as the connection that he feels to them. He at once believes them to be dreams and, in some part of his mind, believes that they really did happen to him. This thinning of reality is what we believe draws them. Speaking them aloud makes them that much more real for him and shines a brighter light for them.

How can you be so sure that there's anything there to communicate with? Simple. It took some time, but they have learned to respond. Let me show you. Now... Tell them what you see. Open the door. Four legs.

You ever stare at a screen so long that it stops being a screen? I don't mean metaphorically. I mean, actually, when your brain's so fried from code and plug-ins and client requests, you start forgetting where the screen ends and you begin. Maybe it's just me in the nature of my job. I spend most of my life staring at a screen, which I suppose is getting more and more common every year, huh? Anyway, that's what it was like, my world melding with my desktop,

before all this started. before the file showed up. I was freelancing out of my apartment, mostly web dev gigs, backend stuff, PhP, JavaScript, the young glamorous code nobody wants to deal with

unless they're getting paid. And the surprisingly lucrative work of fixing code that some lazy college grad screwed up by trying to have AI do it for them. Lazy assholes make for good money. I just finished this massive e-commerce overhaul for a guy named Greg, a real estate agent,

interned crystal shop owner. One of those people who always tells you Mercury's and Gatorade or whatever. He had this website that looked like it hadn't been updated since 2004. Freaking Geo City's graveyard. Dancing Skeleton jiffs. Comic sands headers. Sparkles on every hover state. I stripped it all down, cleaned it up.

Gave him a real store. He paid up front. Didn't micromanage. Honestly, as close to perfect as a client could get, except for the file. The one called 404Lags.html. I didn't build it, and I didn't put it there. But it was in the final folder I uploaded to his live server,

sitting in the root directory like it belonged. At first I figured I'd made a mistake, maybe a file left over from a browser plug-in or a test page I forgot, to delete. But I'm pretty diligent about that kind of thing. I use a sandbox for everything. I don't keep junk on my production builds. And I don't hand over a job that isn't 100% ready. So I opened the file in my browser. Black screen. No styling. No code except a bare bones eye frame and a tiny line of embedded CSS to center the content. And in the middle? A live feed.

Just a camera feed. Pitch black at first. I almost closed it thinking it was broken. But then the image adjusted. Night vision or something like it. Grainy, green and gray. The camera was inside a room. Empty except for a square of tile floor,

a concrete wall behind it and something in the far left corner. It looked like a pile of wires at first. Then it twitched. I leaned in feeling anxious, though I couldn't say why. There was something unnatural about it. Shape, the posture, the stillness. It looked like a man-sized spider. But wrong, its limbs were too long, too thin.

Angular and not hairy, but smooth and pale, almost translucent from what I could see. There were eight legs, spayed across the floor like the stretchers of a broken umbrella. Its body was hunched in a way that didn't make sense, like he was trying to hide in itself. There was no clear head, but I thought I could see a face. Not on the front, but underneath. Almost like a mouth opening downward toward the floor. It wasn't moving, just squatting there, waiting. I mean, I'd seen more than enough, so I closed the tab.

That should have been it, right? Just some weird horror art thing, and maybe an ARG, or a prank left from me by the site owner, or even the last programmer who worked on it. There's nothing to dwell on. I took the rest of the day off to play some video games and decompress. By morning, I barely even remembered the video. I sat down at my workstation and opened a little bit of my workstation and opened a little bit of the day. out my browser and it took me back to the same video screen.

I closed it right away thinking that maybe I hadn't closed it the night before. Maybe I just minimized it and wasn't paying attention. Except every time I opened my browser, regardless of what browser I used, the tab was there. Sometimes I wouldn't even see it reload. It would just be open. Always titled 404 Legs. The feed? It changed.

At first, the spider thing, I guess I'll call it, was in the far corner of the room. But when I checked it in another browser, it had moved. Just a little, maybe a few inches closer to the center of the frame. I closed everything down again and started working through the steps, assuming I'd picked up a virus hidden in the site coding that somehow slipped past my antivirus software. I disconnected my station from the internet to keep any virus. potential virus from spreading and communicating, then booted up in safe mode just to be safe. This wasn't the first time I'd had to deal with viruses, and I didn't like to take chances.

Then I ran Bit Defender to check for viruses and malware. When it didn't come back with any results, I won't lie, I felt a little uncomfortable. I ran a full system scan and started to look through the system processes and startup programs. Nothing. I checked the network activity but didn't see any outbound connections. Finally, I did what most IT and computer professionals do when they hit a roadblock. I googled it. Not from my computer.

I still couldn't open anything other than that damn video. I had to go to the library. I couldn't find a damn thing. Nothing even resembling what I saw beyond some weird fetish pages with anime spiders with big boobs. which I immediately got self-conscious about being the fact that I was in a library. I checked the usual forums, still nothing. In my desperation, I checked around some of the, let's say, more unstable discussions. Within about 10 seconds of posting a question about 404L.

My account was deleted off the board by the system admin, no explanation given. When I got home, I connected to the internet again and opened up my browser, hoping something restarted or resolved itself. The video popped up again, and the spider thing was even closer to the camera. I unplugged my router, but it didn't matter. The feed's still loaded. Not just on my computer, on my phone, and on my work laptop. Even the goddamn e-reader I had from college.

all at the same time without me even opening a browser. Same tab, same title, same thing creeping closer every day. I started hearing scurrying, not from the speakers, from the walls. Taping sounds like fingernails on drywall late at night. I live alone, I always have. I walked around the apartment with a flashlight, checking vents, floorboards, and even the ceiling. Nothing. Just the sound. Soft and rhythmic, like something was crawling inside the walls. And the tab kept opening itself. And the feed kept changing. I was pretty fucking beside myself at

that point. I couldn't even boot up old laptops so that's the same thing happening. I couldn't access email. I couldn't work. I couldn't earn money. I took an edible and sat on the couch, telling myself it was okay, that I'd reach out to some associates in the morning and that a night of pizza and horror movies would help. Sometimes the best answer to real-life horrors are some fake ones. The next day I booted up an old laptop only to see that things were still broken. Except this time I noticed something in the feed. There were markings on the wall.

At first I thought it was just dirt or water damage, maybe cracks in the cement. But I adjusted the contrast, took a screenshot, and blew it up. Not exactly crystal clear zoom and enhanced bullshit from movies, but it helped enough for me to make out that the scratches were symbols. Scratched or etched in, I couldn't tell. Circular patterns, spirals, long strokes that trailed off jagged like broken teeth. None of it matched any language I recognized, but somehow looking at them made my skin crawl. Like my brain knew they weren't for me, not meant for anyone.

The creature, the thing, was closer than ever. I could see details now. Its legs weren't just long. They were jointed wrong. The knees or elbows or whatever they were bent randomly backward or forward. Insect-like, ending in clawed digits that twitched subtly. Its skin had the text. of damp rice paper. Under the night vision green, it looks stretched too thin, translucent

in places, showing threads beneath like wires or tendons or veins. The mouth. I was now sure it had one, wasn't on its face. It opened in the chest, a long vertical slit like a second spine cracking open. Inside I saw movement, small legs, many of them, twitching. I slammed my laptop shut and dry heaved into the trash can. Out of any other ideas and probably a few days late on the decision, I called Greg, the client from a landline, asked him if he'd seen the file or heard anything, maybe hired another dev who left weird test pages on the server.

He sounded confused. said he hadn't touched the site, that he had no clue how to do any of the coding, hence hiring me. Didn't even know how to log in, which I remember seeing in the logs. Not one time it had an admin logged in since the site went live, and since the ordering was automated and drop-shipped, he wouldn't have any reason to. I asked the question I've been thinking about since starting work on it, something that didn't make sense. It's one thing to have an old website that looks like,

like an old website, but his site was less than five years old. It didn't make any sense to me that someone who didn't know how to code would hire someone to code a website that looked like a retro eyesore. There was silence on the other end of the phone for painfully long time. I wasn't sure if he was thinking or hesitating or if the call dropped. Finally, he said he bought the domain from someone else. Some old guy passed away not long after he bought the site off of him. Supposed he had the site off of him. Supposed the guy used to run a ham radio and built personal web pages for his research. Greg didn't know much about it, said the site came with some of the original files, but he never looked at him. And that he told the original designer, someone he got cheap off Craigslist to delete him.

When the programmer mentioned some of the files looked corrupted and couldn't be deleted, Greg told him to bury him however he could and dismiss the whole thing. The hairs on my neck stood up. I went back to my desktop and pulled up some backup files I was downloaded for reference points before I started the project, checking the server access logs. I had no reason to before. There was an IP logging in every three days. It wasn't mine, and it wasn't Greg's. Worst, the location traced back to what appeared to be an abandoned lot two states over. I tried to ping the IP address, sending a signal.

to a device on a network to check if it's reachable and to measure the round-trip time for the signal to travel to a device and back. But I got nothing. I stopped working. Not that I had a choice. All I did was watch the feed. The creature had stopped inching forward. It was still now. Too still.

But something was different. The camera had shifted. I hadn't noticed that at first, just to start. assumed it was a new angle. But no. The camera had moved up, higher like it was mounted somewhere new. And the wall behind it? There was peeling wallpaper now.

Not concrete. And a socket, a power outlet. They look familiar. That night, tapping inside the walls, started again. Faster this time, more urgent. It moved. I could hear it pacing behind the drywall. Four soft taps at a time.

Click, click, click, click, click. Pause. Click, click, click, click. I put my ear to the wall. It stopped. And then I heard a breath. Not mine. Wet.

Rattling. Like something with lungs full of mud was on the other side. I didn't sleep that night. If I didn't know better, I'd say I didn't even blink anymore. The feed was still open on my laptop, and the spider thing? It had turned toward the camera. It had, or what passed for it, now faced me.

Not the camera. Me. Two eyes it opened. Not round, not human. Just slits. Vertical and black as holes. The mouth in its chest. quivered. And the darkest part of my mind, I considered that it could be smiling. That

night, it entered the apartment. Not through the door, not the windows. I woke up around 3 a.m. to the sound of something tearing, like drywall being peeled back in slow, wet strips. My room was dark, but the hallway beyond was glowing faint green. The same sickly shade as the feed. didn't move. I held my breath. I watched, paralyzed as a shape unfurled itself through the wall, legs first. One by one, thin and impossibly long, bending in ways it made my joints ache, just watching. It slid through the crack like bones made a smoke, silent except for the wet scrape of its underbelly draking across the floor. Its chest-mouthed. It's chest-mouthed. switched open, tongue like tendrils feeling the air.

It stood at the edge of the hall and just stared at me. Except it didn't have a face, not anymore. Just that single vertical gaping split down the middle of its torso. Inside something pulsed. It took a single step into the room, its joints clicking, and the screen on my laptop still open on my desk. the live video feed now, just an empty room, blinked off. Not turned off, black, like it had been swallowed.

And when I blinked, it was morning. I told myself I'd had a waking nightmare, sleep paralysis, hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation. But when I went to the hallway, I saw it. The wall, the actual drywall had split open, like something that crawled through it. Thin paper cracks spattered out from the gash three feet long and six inches wide. White dust was on the floor. There were no footprints, just drag marks. My laptop?

Bricked. Desktop? The same. If my phone wouldn't turn on. Screen stayed black. No bios, no startup chime. Something inside me cracked. I smashed them with a hammer.

It didn't matter anymore. That night as I was sleeping on my couch, the TV turned itself on. Just static at first. And through it, the feed. The creature now standing in a room I recognized. My room. I started bleeding from places. I shouldn't.

Nose, ears, under my fingernails. Once from the corner of my eye, and the doctor couldn't explain it. Except my blood pressure was fine. It was not any meds. They thought it may be stressed because clearly they didn't know what the fuck was wrong with me

and just wanted to act like they had some idea. But the bleeding always started around 2.17 a.m. Right when the feet had first activated. My walls were rotting from the inside. The walls started to get wavy with water damage, just without water. The wallpaper rippled and peeled. No matter how many times I cleaned, I woke up the webs in the corners, not spider webs, at least not any I'd ever seen.

They were thick and taught, strung in geometric patterns, the kind that seemed too symmetrical, too perfect. day I woke to find one strung across my bedroom doorway from ceiling to floor like a net. When I touched it, it vibrated like a guitar string. Something tugged from the other side. I left that night knowing I'd never return. I crashed at a friend's place for a few days. Didn't tell them what was going on, just said I was having electrical issues.

I thought maybe it was tied to my apartment. Maybe the feed was location-based, some kind of. a ghost in the wires. But the second night there, his smart TV flicker down by itself. Static, and then the feed. The creature was gone from the frame. It's just a room now. Empty, like my dream.

Quiet. The symbols on the wall were deeper and darker. Wet looking. The camera slowly panned, searching. And then in the reflection of the glass behind it. I saw my face, standing in the corner of the room behind the camera, watching myself. No matter where I go, the signal still finds me. I've destroyed every device I owned, even my burner phone, ripped out the motel TV cables and landline,

unplugged the mini-fridge when it started humming at 217. But I hear it. The tapping, the scraping, the breathing behind the mirror. I saw a spider yesterday. Not a regular one. Its legs were too long. They were eight, but each ended in fingers. It crawled into the air vent and didn't make a sound.

Check your browser history. If you see a tab you didn't open, titled 404 legs, don't click it. Don't stare. Don't engage. Because the moment you see it, It sees you, too. You see, they hear him.

They are drawn to him. And to get to him, they must open a door that can only be opened from their side. What's going on? I don't know, Doctor. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please 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 Sherrillite 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.