Creepy - Day 8 - Halloween Gone Wrong & My Father was a Pack Rat

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Halloween Gone Wrong***Written by: No One of Consequence and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***My Father Was a Pack Rat***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.

Now. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. listener discretion is advised. It's midnight, it's October, and that means KREP is on the air

and ready to guide you through this most magical time of year. It's day eight of the 31 days of horror, a time of cool winds, falling leaves, costumes, and pumpkins. And the veil between what we know and what we will never understand is the thinnest, and the darkness that creeps around the shadows is free to play. You're listening to KREP and I'm your host, then knocking at your door when no one's there, the creep himself. Caller, you're on with KREP.

Is this the creep? You better believe it. Is this a he... Oh, sorry. Looks like the call dropped off. Must have been going through a tunnel. Let's try another. Caller, you're on with the creep.

Hey, so, um, do I just tell you something that happened to me? I'm not sure what the rules are. Oh, I wouldn't worry about rules. Why don't you just tell us a little about yourself? What brought you to call into the station tonight? Okay, well, I guess I called because of a Halloween gone wrong. Right now, life is good. The temperatures aren't high enough to make me sweat just for being outside.

the leaves are turning colors and the air is ripe with the smell of fires people are constantly gathering firewood and using it to stay warm at night I'm told it's because it saves on the heating bill but I just love the smell okay the whole bit about the heating bill I don't know much about that

I'm only 16 and I don't have any bills aside for my cell phone usage and scoring some gas money if my parents let me use the car I don't have much to do with budgets. I'm a little absent-minded, so I'm constantly getting in trouble for forgetting to do something. Like now, for instance. I was supposed to be home hours ago

because I need to get my little brother ready for trick-or-treating. Halloween is a big thing in our town, which isn't surprising. With a name like Ghost Lake, you either embrace the spooky or you move. Unless you're like me, and have to wait until you're old enough to leave home, but it's not so bad. People around here are pretty friendly, and don't take the spooky aspect too extremely.

It's like a lot of small towns, and most of the people are into the season for the kids. If you're too old for trick-or-treating and too young for the adult parties, either take younger siblings out, or you're the one handing out candy at home. High school parties never seem to take place on Halloween itself, but a day or two before. Last night I'd stayed at a friend's place, completely forgetting about the party happening at Rogers Farm. I know. Even an absent-minded teen shouldn't forget something like that, but it wasn't completely my fault. Diana broke out the weed and we paked our minds into oblivion. We're lightweights, so it really didn't take much.

We ended up sleeping most of the day away, too. Ghost Lake only has a population of like 532 or something like that. not including the many, many farms surrounding us. Everyone knows everyone around here, and that can get a bit annoying. Diana lives on the other side of town from me, a whopping two miles. But going back and forth on foot has always met with nosy towns folks. They're always saying hi and asking what I'm up to, which may just sound like they're being friendly,

but when it's every single day, even multiple times if I walk back and forth, It gets old. I pull the collar up on my leather jacket to shield my neck from the chilly breeze moving in from the north. Normally I'd have a scarf with me, but I didn't expect the temperature to drop quite this much. Then again, I hadn't exactly planned on walking across town in the early evening. I was supposed to be home no later than three, and here it is 5.30. If memory serves me correctly, and it usually doesn't, trick-or-treating is supposed to start at six. Hopefully mom got Denny ready by now.

Mom's going to be super pissed at me. Her and dad volunteered to participate in the church's haunted house this year. Something they love to do, but can't always manage. Since I'm older now, and therefore supposed to be more responsible, they decided that my plans could take a back seat to what they wanted, for me to take Denny trick-or-treating so that they can have fun scaring the pants off the rest of the kids in the community. I've never been much for scary things.

When I was young and accidentally caught sight of an old horror movie on TV, it would give me nightmares for a week. The idea of a kid's toy coming to life with murderous intent, saying someone's name in a mirror so many times to summon them, or a psycho killer that can be shot, stabbed, burned, electrocuted, and blown up, only to come back as strong as ever. I never saw the fun in that. Giving a bad guy that can die as easily as me and I can get behind that.

some invincible monster that you have no hope of defeating, and if by some outlandish miracle you manage it, only for them to come back in another flick like nothing happened? I ask you, What's the point? Set me up with a good zombie flick any day, though those are hard to find. The odds may be stacked against you in a zombie apocalypse,

but at least you can kill them. For a while, I was pretty big into some well-known TV shows, the kinds that got a lot of attention, because of either the controversial storyline or the phenomenal acting. My Uncle Corey came over one day while I was watching my favorite show. Diana had been in quarantine with COVID, so I planned on calling her after the show to talk about it. Uncle Corey sat down with me during a rather intense betrayal murder scene,

pushing the boundaries of what TV could show. He recognized the show and asked me how I could watch that crab. I was immediately offended, defending the brilliance of the storyline and the awesome acting. Then Uncle Corey said, I can't get into shows like this. Everyone's a bad guy, so there's no one to invest in. I pointed out the obvious, saying that,

of course the main character is the good guy. They're the one you're supposed to get behind. Isn't that guy a gun-running murderer or something? There were more aspects to his character, including some other more dark things, But if you wanted to sum it up in a few words, those would do. Okay, so he's a bad guy. You wouldn't want to be on that guy's side in real life, would you?

Uncle Corey shattered my world that day, and now I can't enjoy shows like that. Diana also blames him because she forced me to tell her why I stopped watching, and it ruined her, too. Nowadays, I'm into a show called Zombie Eradication Patrol. It follows a group of civilian zombie enthusiasts in the middle of an outbreak, It starts out in a medium-sized city, but when it kicks off, it's unclear if the outbreak is worldwide or isolated to their location. The four main characters scavenge for supplies, kill zombies, and try to locate a safe zone, unsure if there is one.

Sounds kind of typical, I know, but for some reason I love it. Took half a season for Diana to come around. Then she got the brilliant idea to buy some zombie shooter games. I don't recommend playing these games while you're high like we did last night. We were so stone that we fell asleep in the middle of a game. When we woke up, the screen showed our corpses being torn apart by a horde, and in big bloody letters, the screen said, you're dead. It freaked us out.

I'm walking down Main Street now and get an eerie feeling. There isn't a soul in sight. Normally there's at least one shop owner sweeping the sidewalk in front of their door, or someone messing with a display in their main window. There isn't any activity at all, which is just wrong. People should be doing last-minute candy buying for the impending kitties. The only thing I see are the usual cars parked along the sidewalks. For the streets to be completely empty like this,

they either called to town meeting or there was some kind of evacuation event that Diana and I missed. That last one hasn't ever happened, but it's the only thing I can come up with. Now that I think about it, I hadn't seen Diana's parents in the house when we emerged from the basement. If there was a town meeting or some logical explanation as to why the streets are empty, someone would have told us. I pull out my cell phone and curse my stupid brain. I forgot to plug the damn thing in. Fearing the worst, I start running home. Things just keep getting more.

as I make my way through town. Even away from Main Street, I should be seeing people getting ready for the trick-or-treaters, but there isn't anyone around. No one is pulling out tables and chairs to sit among their decorations. Long gone are the days of kids knocking on doors. Even adults without kids will set up a chair in their driveway or something and hand out candy.

I see plenty of decorations, but no people at all. What's going on? Ghost Lake has turned into a ghost town. It doesn't take very long to get home, not with as fast as I'm running. I have no idea what's going on, but it can't be anything good. When I get to the front yard, I see the decorations just as they were when I left yesterday. They're all on display, but nothing is lit up. Even the dangling ghosts that are supposed to shake and make noise are quiet, moving only with the breeze.

Both cars are in the driveway, but it doesn't look like there are any lights on inside. I've got a really bad feeling about this. I reach into my pocket for my keys, but when I get to the door, I find it slightly ajar. Both my parents would have gotten on to me about not closing the door in a timely manner. Something about that's how you get bugs. If their cars are here, then there's no rational reason for the door to be open. Then again, very little about today seems rhaps. Pushing the door open all the way.

I look into the dark living room. The TV is on static, and Mom's table-side lamp is on. She only turns that on in the evening when she's settling on her end of the couch to read one of her trashy romance novels. Dad's recliner is on the opposite side of the couch, and the foot rest is propped up, but he's not in it. He never leaves it in the reclined position like that. Whatever happened must have been quick.

and it must have happened sometime last night. More than anything, I want to call out for them right now. But that bad feeling I've got wants me to keep quiet. I may not watch scary movies, but I know some of the tropes. Characters always call out in the dark, and it never ends well for them. I'm not expecting some crazy, knife-wielding psycho clown to come around the corner looking to stick me, but I'm expecting something bad. Maybe it's an invasion by an alien race that uses people to breed.

That would explain why I haven't seen any bodies. Okay, I recognize how absurd that is. But again, I'm only 16. Of course my mind is going to go to some insane places first. It's like in my DNA or something, isn't it? Of course, once the alien idea gets in my head, I get really worried. My parents are adults and stand a decent chance of being able to fight someone or something off. But what about Denny? He's only 12.

I take the stairs two at a time, not caring about the noise I'm making. I'm very protective of my brother. Always have been. That's why I didn't complain too terribly when my parents ordered me to take him out tonight. Last year, I caught some of Denny's classmates roughing him up at the park one summer day. They were calling him all kinds of names and throwing hands, some with closed fist. I know there is an honor in hitting little kids, but I bitch slapped those little shits red in the face. They ran home crying for Mama when I was done with them. You see, Denny was always smaller than the kids his age.

Mom had some complications during her pregnancy with him, though I don't know the details. He's always been a little underdeveloped physically. But the kid is smart. Not so much book smart, but he's really good at figuring things out. He can do a puzzle like no one I've met. Figures out riddles that stump college professors. It can take apart and reassemble a high-end clock without instructions. He's a sweet kid, too, and humble.

He wouldn't intentionally do anything to upset anyone, and to think some alien scumbag may have laid a finger on him? I burst through his open door, but the room is in. empty. All his stuff is where it always is, organized and everything. His window is open, which is odd. Denny gets cold easily and would never even open his window. Not this time of year, certainly. There's no sign of a struggle, and it looks like all his clothes are here. That's what I look at his bed. There's something on the neatly made bed that shouldn't be there. In fact, he should be wearing it right now. His Halloween costume. Mom made it just for him. A white sheet with a bunch of

black ovals all over. It's a homemade version of Charlie Brown's ghost outfit. I'd planned on carrying a few rocks in my pocket while we were out, and I was going to randomly hand him one. It's his favorite Halloween special. Quickly, I rush into my room and plug my phone into one of those portable battery packs I have. I'm not waiting for it to charge, only to register. there's power so I can use the damn thing. Before I can get into my phone book, Diana's picture pops up and her ringtone plays. I answer it and I'm about to ask if she knows what's going on, but I don't get the chance. Her voice is so high-pitched and hysterical as I can barely understand her.

I've been there for her through enough breakups that I can decipher her upset talking, but it takes a minute. After I left her house, Diana headed over to the church because she's helping with haunted house. On her way there, she saw a gathering of adults in the parking lot. They were beating on a car that had two little girls screaming inside. At first, she thought they accidentally had been locked inside the car, but those weren't screams for help. They were the screams of little girls scared to death, and the adults weren't trying to get them out. Someone in the crowd happened to look over at her while she watched in shock to awe. It was Mrs. Kimball, our chemistry teacher.

But the feral roar that came out of her mouth didn't sound friendly or human. Mrs. Kimball and a handful of the other adults there turned and ran after Diana. The last thing she heard before getting out of there was the shattering of car window glass. Diana managed to get to the church, and there were lots of people there, but none of them could help her. She saw blood and parts strewn about like decorations, bodies nailed upside down to a crudely made crosses, and other things she couldn't begin to understand. In her haste, she could see none of them were moving, and a lot of them look small, like kids.

The larger bodies look like our classmates, all dressed in costumes. The party at Rogers' farm? She kept running, but more adults were coming at her from different directions. Right now, she's held up in a tool shed at the back of the church, and I can hear a pounding fist at the door. Diana claims that the shed is very sturdy, but it won't last forever. She's got the door barricaded with landscaping equipment, and is holding an axe like a lifeline.

It seems every adult in the town has gone insane in his killing the young. Her older brother is out there, one of the ones trying to break down the door, and he just turned 18 a month ago. I could speculate as to why he's among the insane mob, but I'm moving again. I've rarely gone into my parents' bedroom in my 16 years, because neither I nor Danny are allowed in there alone. Dad keeps his hunting rifle, duck gun, and revolver under the bed and cases. The ammunition is kept on the top shelf at their walk-in closet. I'm not supposed to know that, but I do.

Call it a dumb-ass kids need to know more than he should. Well, it's actually more simple than that. Mom's been an on-again, off-again smoker for years, and I went looking for a pack of smokes last year. She claimed to have quit again, but I could smell the smoke faintly on her sweater. After searching through her nightstand and dresser, I searched the closet.

That's how I found the ammo. As for knowing how to load the revolver and how to shoot it, I can thank my dad for that. He took me hunting when I was 12 and taught me how to shoot. I never thought it would come in handy outside of a deer bird, though. I get the pistol case from under the bed and turn to the closet for the box of 38 specials, only there's something wrong with the door. It doesn't sit in the frame like it's supposed to, and there's a black mark on the white painted wood, as if someone kicked the door in.

I have to manhandle the door and pull it open, which isn't the way it was meant to open. When I managed to get it out of the way, an acrid smell hits my nose. It smells like piss, and I quickly flip on the lights. There's a dark stain on the carpet, and I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I found those kids roughing up Denny last year, he'd gotten so scared from what they were doing that he wet his pants. Like I said, he's a sweet kid that never wants to upset anyone.

He doesn't deal with confrontation well. And the one time our dad lost his cool and yelled at him for accidentally spilling a can of paint in the garage, Denny had wet himself. Dad felt immediately guilty for raising his voice, and I'd cleaned the mess while he took Denny inside. I imagine it now. Whatever happened to send the adults over the deep end started sometime early last night while I was at Diana's. Mom and Dad were in the living room settling in for the regular nightly ritual of reading and watching TV when the event started.

They got up from their chairs, went upstairs, and went after Denny. He's small and fast, so he probably managed to get around him, but they chased him. Instead of going downstairs, he went into their room and hid in the closet. Judging by the black mark, I found on the outside of the door, Mom was the one to kick it in. Now that the door is open and I can see the interior side, I see a smear of dried blood. It was made by a small hand, smaller than mine. Diana said there were bodies all over the churchyard. Dead kids.

Is Denny there among them? Last night, we'd been in the basement, and since we were smoking weed, we'd lock the door. Did the lock stop her parents from coming for us? After what she'd said happened in the parking lot, I'm thinking it was because they hadn't seen us. I'm numb as I reach up to the shelf and pull down the box of bullets. Tears aren't streaming down my room.

my face as I put six rounds into the cylinder, but I am shaking. Not with fear, but with rage. Whatever happened to turn the adults against the kids? It happened in this house. They took my brother and hurt him, killed him. After the adults massacred the kids, they must have gone out to the Rogers Farm and murdered the teens. I could ask why, but what would be the point? The sound of a girl sobbing and pounding on walls come back to me, and I remember my cell phone. Diana is still trapped in the shed. It's only a matter of time before those crazies get in. Can I get there before they break down the door?

And if I do, can I get her out before they get me? Dad keeps his spare keys in a drawer in the kitchen, and his Jeep has a sturdy grill on the front. You could take out a small tree with that thing. so I wonder what it'll do to a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs. Only one way to find out. And now a word from our sponsors. We're back on the air with KREP. Unfortunately, it looks like our phone lines have melted

and our techs are working to get things under control. So it looks like back to the mailbag we go. This listener has some family problems because evidently my father is a pack rat. I've been around a good number of military servicemen and women in my life. Friends from high school, co-workers, neighbors. If there's one thing I've come to learn when it comes to soldiers who've seen some shit, like real shit, they don't talk about it.

You hear some guy talking big? Maybe not specifically saying they serve, but talking like they did? and you know the type. The ones who want to tell you what soldiers think and why they serve. They're liars. All of them. Maybe they did serve, but they didn't see combat. Combat does something to a person.

Something hard to name. Maybe not PTSD exactly, but something the mind can't quite handle. I read somewhere the PTSD's, actually our brains trying to save us, trying to block out the bad stuff. I don't know how true any of that is, but I know my dad went through some shit, because he never talked about it. He was drafted out of high school, and before he knew it, he was over in Vietnam. I never got the whole story, mostly just things that I sort of pieced together.

Maybe stories I told myself as a kid. to make sense of my dad's behavior, like where we'd find him sometimes. The first time I ever remember finding dad, I was maybe six or so. It was the middle of the night and I'd gotten up to pee, something I'd never remember doing before that. And I heard this weird sort of barking moan. It scared me enough that I ran into mom and dad's room only to find that mom was alone in bed. I didn't think anything of it, my mind being on the noise that scared me.

It took mom maybe three seconds to wake up, hear my words, and immediately old out of bed like some kind of action hero. She told me to go to my room, I think. but when she went into the basement, I followed. I don't know if it was just that I was too scared to go to my room alone or just wanted to see what was happening. But I followed my mom into our unfinished basement and into the corner near the furnace I'd been told not to play around. And there, I saw my mom standing at the entry of the crawl space,

looking into the darkness. Her voice was soft, soothing. like the sound when she'd sing to me before bed. The next thing I knew I saw a hand reaching out from the darkness of the space under our house and I let out a scream. Mama immediately spun around and snapped at me to be quiet before turning back toward the hand that had retreated back into the darkness, saying it was okay, that she was there, that he was fine.

When my father finally crawled out, He had a look on his face like he wasn't even really awake. Mom didn't even acknowledge me again beyond telling me to go back to bed as she put a hand on my dad's arm and let him back upstairs. It took years and years to form a story. My parents didn't talk about problems. They avoided them. So it took me a while to put together that Dad had been a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Dad was only about 5'4.

I was taller than him by fifth grade. Grandpa was about 6 too, but it turns out Dad had some kind of sickness when he was born that affected his height. I stopped growing at 6'3. I think sometimes people forget that there was a while during Vietnam that American soldiers basically thought

the Viet Cong were ghosts. They'd appear, attack, and disappear. Some chalked it up to not being ready for jungle warfare. But the answer was a bit simpler. Tunnels. The Via Kong had a complex and advanced series of tunnels that ran all over the country that they lived, trained, and planned in. Once America figured it out, it came down to there needing to be a way to fight them on their own turf.

Enter the tunnel rats. Booby traps like grenades, snakes, poison gas, some pungy sticks, which were sharpened bamboo stakes coated in piss and shit. If you didn't die from blood loss, infection would get you. Just some of the things tunnel rats had to endure and avoid. Not to mention cave ends and just the ability to keep your senses crawling through the pitch black towards who knew how many enemy soldiers. You had to volunteer to be a tunnel rat.

But I think some guys over the... they just knew what they were supposed to do. Like my dad, you didn't leave those tunnels, the same person who went in them. I remember hearing a quote from a tunnel rat once saying he didn't feel like a human being anymore, just an animal. He'd become a rat to survive in there, and maybe as a way to cope with the things he'd done to survive and to save the lives of American soldiers. I don't know anything about my dad's service.

He never talked about it to me. He talked about it later to other people, but everything I heard was secondhand or pieced together for mom. On the surface, everything was fine. But at least a few nights a week, I'd hear that moaning and know that dad had either slept walk into the crawl space

or gone there for his own reasons. My father wasn't well. He returned from service and had been spit on, called the child killer by the same people protesting the war in the first place. Veteran assistance still isn't even close to what's needed, but back then? Good luck. People still pointed to World War II soldiers, calling them the greatest generation, pretending like those soldiers came home from fighting the Nazis and Japanese and just went back to their lives like nothing had happened to them.

They didn't report the alcoholism, the rates of abuse and suicide. I think Dad just felt safer in the dark. More than once there was a terrible stench coming from the crawl space. I remember a pest control guy coming by and taking out a few dead rabbits and raccoons. I didn't understand at the time, but I guess the tunnels in Vietnam stunk to high heavens since they had their own latrines down there. I think he wanted it to feel more familiar. Eventually, Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and we put him in a home.

Mom moved to her own assisted living to be near him, saying she didn't want to stay in the house without him. I had my own family, my own home. so I hired some cleaners and put it on the market. I got a call about an hour after the cleaners arrived about the smell. I told them about the dead animals, probably sounding way too nonchalant for how weird it really was. The next call I got was from the police.

The investigations are ongoing since they're so little left of the bodies. Most are just a pile of bones, I guess. Sometimes I try to put a reason behind it, try to figure out what dad could have been thinking. But all I keep coming back to is the smell and being surrounded by death. There's too much to think about, and I was hoping that telling this would get some of the weight off my shoulders. But really, I'm conflicted.

On one hand, I could accept what the police told me. I could accept what the press said. I could tell myself that my father, a traumatized war veteran, couldn't let go of that darkness, and it forced them to do horrible things. On the other hand, I could confess, tell them how those bodies really got there, and spend the rest of my life in prison. Decisions, decisions. One thing's for sure. I need to find a new crawl space.

Looks like the attacks aren't having much luck, the phone lines. On the plus side, they aren't melting anymore, but it does look like they might be moving on their own volition. Or maybe it's a trick of the light. Or maybe there's no trick at all, and let's not think too much about that. As always, this is the creep, and you're listening to KREP, today, tomorrow, and forever. 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 share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors.

No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.