Creepy - Death’s Head Drive & To Be A Butterfly

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Death’s Head Drive***Written by: Philip Tice and Narrated by: Cole Burkhardt***To Be A Butterfly***Written by: Steven Hinton Jr and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***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.

No. 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. Happy harvest day or happy overeating day or happy tiptoeing around certain conversations with your family day. Or happy, yes, gravy is keto as long as you don't use flour to thicken it day.

Or maybe it's just another day depending on where and when you're listening to this. Regardless, I hope that you and yours are doing your best and taking a moment to enjoy what you have. On our side, we'll try to do our part to provide a little joyful horror to your day. First up, from writer Philip Tice and narrated by Cole Burkart. Creepy Presents, Death's Head Drive. The roads and highways of New Jersey are our lifeblood, a maze of interlacing asphalt veins, decipherable only by those who know our homeland like the back of their hands. For as iconic as they are, every kid in Jersey is brought up with a healthy fear of our roads

and what might lurk in the shadows of their shoulders. We've all heard the stories about Shades of Death Row in Warren County, where spectral fog rises from the spots where unsolved murders were committed, or Clinton Road in West Milford, where you risked a run-in with phantom prom queens and pottets of lost time, or the gates of hell that lurk in the tunnels beneath the Clifton Street train bridge. But what they don't tell you, what you have to learn for yourself, is that the most dangerous roads in the garden state, are the ones without names, those unnotable stretches of packed dirt and cracked blacktop that hide between the map lines, revealing their secrets only to the

those lost or reckless enough to stumble upon them. I learned that lesson for myself, one dark autumn night. This is my story, one of countless many. I had made the trek out to New Brunswick to visit friends who were studying at Reddgers. Our state college famed both for the quality of its medical school and its student body's appetite for wild partying. The last time I had visited my Rutgers crew, a bicycle was thrown through a dorm window, and the police sent everyone scattering to the wind like rats escaping a sinking ship.

All in all, a pretty tame Thursday night in New Brunswick. This visit was faded to end much the same as the previous. After a drungy show at the basement punt venue known only as the Meat Locker, the raucous after-party of drunch 19-year-olds was heroically dispersed by the brave men and women of the N-B-P-D. I escaped amongst the chaos, gunning my second-hand Mazda out of there before they could get my name, or worse yet, call my mother. I flew out of New Brunswick, navigating by moonlight and memory. Stars still popping at the corners of my eyes like the cola that had been fizzing alongside the cheap whiskey in my cup only a half hour before.

However, my usual route home was jarringly blocked off by roadwork, one of the countless construction crews that seemed to apparate out of thin air on Jersey highways after the clock has struck midnight. By random fate or sinister design, I was shunned from the safe street lamps and familiar exits of Route 78, and instead followed the glinting orange detour signs down and, a country road I hadn't known it existed before that night. I still do not know the road's name, nor have I ever been able to find it again on a map. Despite North Jersey's notorious industrialization, I quickly found myself ensconced in a thick darkness reserved for the most remote stretches

of the pine barrens, the refineries and their ever belching smote-stats disappearing on the muddy horizon. The suburbs fell away and were replaced by endless fields of swaying marshland reeds, out of which emerged lopsided telephone poles and the occasional sunken house, whose peeling paint and black eyes stared back at me as they slowly surrendered to the sucking mud. Save for the rare street lamp, which was becoming ever more scarce as I followed the dark detour deeper, My headlights were the only source of illumination, the only signs of life, on this snating stretch of road. This was a place where, should you be unlucky enough to crash, the marsh would swallow you up before anyone even knew to come looking. You may be familiar with places like these as dumping grounds for bodies in reruns of the Sopranos, but I promise they are.

are real and even more frightening at night. With only my headlights and the vague sense of direction to guide me, I continued down the reedy road at a steady pace, looking for the inevitable turnoff that would detour me back to civilization. But there were no side roads here, no escape from the strangling swamp grasses. At first, there was the occasional dilapidated gas station, or crooked mailbox to mark the roadside,

but, just like the street lamps, those soon dried up as well. Where was I that there was so much room for such emptiness? It seemed impossible, liminal, even, for such a stretch to be hidden here. But all that overbearing absence, that noisy nothingness, drew my attention to the way,

one companion I did have. A pair of headlights had appeared in my rearview mirror. Another wayward traveler detoured against their will, I assumed. If I didn't make it home, at least there was now one person who would be able to attest to my existence. How wrong I was. As the other vehicle drew closer, I began to make out details. It was a rust-peppered pickup truck, sporting a charcoal-gray paint job, blazing halogen eyes, and a snubbed nose hood, a trademark of some boxy late-90s model.

Despite the truck's age, the pickup kept pace with my car, shockingly well, quickly catching up until it was following about 30 feet behind my bumper. Had this truck been behind me before I took the detour? If not, where had it come from? I wondered, my eyes now flicking to my mirrors every 20 seconds or so. There must have been some old service road I had missed. I felt a million unseen eyes bearing down on me from the shifting sea of meadow grass as the glaring headlights of the charcoal pickup burned a whole. hole in the back of my head, feeling like judgment for the prickling hackles of suspicion that

were starting to climb up my neck. The gap between us held steady, but I could feel that flatbed chomping at some invisible reins, its thrumming engine eager for release. But despite that wide, open lane between us, it never made a move to pass me, content. to huff hot exhaust at my heels. Finally, we hit a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, a crucifix of back roads overlapping east to west and north to south. I continued straight, not daring to defy the detour, should I risk becoming irreversibly lost in this stretch of anonymous backcountry.

But I figured that if the pickup wanted to be free from me, he would turn off here and go about his nocturnal activities elsewhere. But the charcoal pickup thundered through the crossroads without hesitation, and, as if offended by my mere speculation of its departure, the truck began to speed up. Questions rattled through my mind as I felt the pit in my stomach sink lower and lower, until I worried my duts might scrape the axle beneath me. Where is this truck going?

Could it be the police who had mistaken my sleep deprivation driving for a drunken escapade? No, no police officer, county, or trooper, drove a truck like that. Maybe my taillight was out, or something had fallen off my car, and this was just some good Samaritan trying to warn me. But then, why had he not flashed his highbeams, the universal sign for Beware in the Lerner, in the Ler. language of the open road. Even if my gas tank had fallen out of my car and was now dragging behind me, I didn't dare stop. If I did, he would touch me, whoever he was. Reflections of the pickup's blazing beams shone into my cabin from every angle, deflecting off my mirrors until it created a blinding kaleidoscope. The light, which a few minutes ago, had seemed as ordinary as a

any other headlights on any other highway, now felt hateful, vindictive even. Grimmissing, I tilted my rearview to deflect some of the glare, but my heart leapt into my mouth when I realized that my vehicular stalker was now looming only a couple of feet behind my trunk. Almost too afraid to hold my gaze on the rearview, and worried I might be careen off the road if I stared too long, I forced myself to steal a glance into the pickup's cabin in a desperate attempt to identify my pursuer. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the seeping blackness of the truck cabin, which seemed to swallow even the glow of my taillights, only a few feet in front of it. But as my vision adjusted, I could finally make out the form of a man,

or perhaps what once might have been a man. It's sharp jaw underlit by the reddish glow of the truck's dashboard radio. There lurched a figure, sporting a frayed leather jacket that melted into the shadows and thick driving gloves he used to strangle the pickup's maroon steering wheel. But his face was missing the nose and eyes. that might have granted him human features, and he lacked the lips to hide the too wide, toothy grimace that was permanently chiseled across his face.

A bare skull. That's what sat atop his shoulders, where a human's fleshy head should have been, and even without eyes, I could tell that vacuous black sockets of this death's head were staring right at me. As the titanic roar of his diesel engine shook my Mazda down to its sprockets

and my bones to their marrow, I felt his malevolent presence advancing behind me, as well as another emotion staining his aura. That of amusement, like a wolf toying with a fleeing rabbit, amused and hushed. and hungry. Each passing moment brought the barreling bumper

of the coughing pickup closer to the rear of my car, but I evaded the death's head attempts to ram me with a few well-timed pumps from my accelerator, keeping myself just inches in front of the dented death machine.

My lead foot felt heavier than it ever had before, weighed down by the primal fear that gripped to every tense muscle in my body, because I knew if I ever let my speed wane for even a second, the demonic driver would rear-end me and send my Mazda careening into the marsh reeds,

where my demise would be swallowed up in the swaying depths of those secretive stalks. With no one around to help, or even hear me scream, an accident like that would surely, surely mean my capture at the hands of the death's head. And then, well, I'd rather not think about the and then. That's when I looked back in my rear view to catch another glimpse of the death's head skull, which ebbed and flowed in the shadows, like trying to catch a face in the static of a rabbit-eared TV.

and I saw something that chilled me down to my toes. Whatever passing amusement that had been present in the skull's bony visage was gone, and his sockets seemed to have narrowed into an impossible glare. I heard the pickup rage behind me, spitting dust and rocks from its tires, as it blazed forward and finally made comely. contact with my bumper. Not fast enough for a proper slam, but enough to rock my car and nearly send me fish-tailing. I wrestled the wheel back under my control just in time for the truck to fall back and ram me again, meaner this time like a demolition derby vet out for blood. I dared not look

back at that crimson-tinted skull, but I could feel his smile widening. Both of us knew that in a battle of brawn, his American steel behemoth would easily crush my Japanese sedan, like a tin can on the roadside, with one more well-placed blow. Just as I saw the truck's hateful headlights drop back for another attack, my pinprick eyes spotted a twinkle emanating from the shadows, growing brighter by the second until it beamed like a fluorescent star at the mouth of this black tunnel. It was the highway dead ahead. The highway meant street lamps and the shining facade of used car dealerships and other drivers.

Friendly eyes to corroborate my nightmarish pursuit. Maybe I could find safety in numbers and the possibility of witnesses might dissuade the death's head from whatever nefarious purpose. he had mind for me. I just had to make it to the highway. However, the Phantom Trucker must have experienced the same revelation. As a second later,

I heard the pick-ups renewed snarl behind me as it raged forward, its headlights consuming my mirrors as it gunned for one final chance to run me off the road. The pure terror

flooding my synapses chased away any remaining concern for road laws, and I flattened my accelerator pedal to the floor, blasting down the last stretch of darkened marshland, as the jittering red needle of my speed gauge climbed. 70, 80, 90. My pulse pounded through my palms, clammy with pulled sweat as my fingers instinctively dug into the steering wheel leather. But still, the death's head did not, yield. Not daring to turn my eyes towards the truck, but feeling the skull's hot breath on my neck, I peeled a sharp right turn, sitting out onto the illuminated highway with so much momentum I thought my car might flip, head over heels. But any fate would have been better than

whatever awaited me amongst the reeds at the hands of the death's head. Beryling out into the harsh electric halo to join the other night jockeys on the... this nippy fall night, I exhaled for what felt like the first time in nearly half an hour. Finally, I mustered the courage to look behind me. I expected the pickup truck to have crept back into the shadows like a panther, or to have disappeared in the light like the bad dream I hoped he was. But there it remained, that rusty charcoal tormentor, rolling down the highway behind me like just another commuter on their way back from a late night in the city. Somehow, that made it all the more frightening.

But then came a maneuver there before unseen by the vehicular apparition, a turn signal. I watched in my side mirror as the truck glided into the adjacent lane, but before I could glean any relief from the moment, he began to pick up speed yet again, and my stomach sank, as I realized that he would soon be directly beside me, his mortal prey. I fixed my eyes on the road ahead, like a kid who thinks that if you don't look at the monster on the other side of the sheets, it can't see you either. But I couldn't resist the morbid curiosity of sneaking a look at my ghastly pursuer after so. many miles. Turning my head, like a startled deer, I peered into the pickup's passenger-side window

just in time to catch a glimpse of no one. The cabin was abandoned, devoid of the death's head, or any driver for that matter. The truck's bench seat was empty, though the pickup still turned and accelerated, as if a living pilot was sitting. behind its wheel. This was in 2017, mind you, when driverless cars were still fringe ideas, and even if they had existed,

they wouldn't have used a rust bucket Ford to make one. Dumbfounded, my foot instantly lifted off my accelerator, my frantic speed waning and allowing the empty truck to pull ahead, ignoring me, like an old flame

you don't want to acknowledge, after a bad breakup. It proceeded to blow through a red light beyond which I could not follow, and the last I saw of the death's head, the seething red eyes of its taillights, were disappearing into the unfeeling night. But its malicious presence plunded to me like a bad stench for the rest of the drive, lurking in the shadows of every way station and shuttered rest stop I passed on my way home. To this day, I don't know what the death's head was or why it chose me as its midnight prey. Maybe it was some territorial inhabitant of the sunken marsh house who had been angered by the detour's disturbance, or the phantom of some hideous car wreck, both truck and man, risen from the dead to lash out at a world that had long forgotten them.

Maybe it was the motorized cousin of the headless horsemen who lurked right over the river in Sleepy Hollow or a wayward member of the wild hunt those skull-headed omens of doom from Germanic folklore. But the mysteries of New Jersey are many and the explanations for them are few even in this modern age of skepticism. And even if I could find my way back to that name

endless road and its skull-faced guardian, far be it from me to pull back the curtain on my homeland's secrets. You'll just have to take her on turn some night and find out for yourself. And from writer Stephen Hinton Jr. and narrated by Heather Thomas, creepy presents to be a butterfly. Soft, innocent, free, beautiful. I'm I saw them every day, flapping their mirrored wings in a rhythm only they knew how to dance to. They were personifications of those four words, these butterflies. After school, my mother and I stood amongst the flowers, mained with petals of every color, snuggled within the battalion of lime-green blades.

The grass waltzed to their war song, played by the wind's flute. It was never cold, this whistling wind. Only warmth nuzzled against my ivory cheeks, but a greater heat crowned my black hair. The golden sun was a deity, gazing upon this field of dreams, and the butterflies, they flew high into the sky,

but never too close to the glowing god, as if wary of Icarus's tail. And there she was, by my side, looking at the butterflies, her eyes wide and watering with salty glee, Yes, and I knew what those tears meant, for our green eyes were akin to another. Envy hid behind frail droplets, but why should she be jealous of butterflies? Even so, she stared at them with awe.

I envied that stare. She never looked at me with such joy, with such hope. Only scowls, as if I were supposed to be at the bottom of her shoe. scowls to one who did not deserve hope. That is until a butterfly landed on my hand. So soft, so innocent, so free, so beautiful. I felt its tiny legs against my skin and warmth the wind could never mimic,

rushed throughout my body. I looked at my mother to those eyes I grew to hate and saw a tear roll down her face. She wiped it away, her hand pushing the tear into her brown hair. I stared at her, gaping. She was smiling, smiling at me. An even greater heat dwarfed the warmth from earlier,

as if the sun seared my heart, and I felt joyous. Yes, joyous. I looked back at the butterfly, and my sudden head movement scared it away. As it flew, I caught a glance at its wings, those wings a deep shade of crimson red such a complexion must be her favorite color i thought and this color was the beginning of my hope once in the house i began to brainstorm how can i make her look at me

like that again would i need butterflies but such a task would require me to capture so many of them That would be my last resort, and I should look for a more efficient alternative. So I began to plan. I yearned to feel the warmth of the fields again. I became addicted. As she made dinner, I walked to my mother and tugged on her apron. My question would be simple. What do you like the most?

As I pulled, the sharp smell of the liquid I used to clean flesh wounds, pierced my nose. nose. She finally turned around, glaring at me with bulging veins. What? She said. What do you like the most? I asked. My mother's eyebrows only dug deeper, and her rough hands cemented themselves on my ivory cheeks. Again, and again, and again. Each slap stung like boiling water, and I ran to the bathroom, locking the door behind me. I looked into the bathroom mirror, my eyes beginning to swell with tears, but... No, this was not a bad thing. She was merely answering the question.

As I stared into the mirror, I saw the reflection of that butterfly. My cheeks were like its wings, a mirror of each other. both stained red. I instead laughed at the mirror, for my reflection was assigned to continue in my pursuit. I rushed to my room and began drawing butterflies on every piece of paper I found. It took me an hour to draw the best butterfly I could

on a piece of brown construction paper. Afterwards, I ran back to the kitchen, but my mother was nowhere to be found. I looked around the house until I saw her sitting in front of the fireplace, lying in a rocking chair. A smell from earlier choked the air. There were empty glass bottles scattered around the room, and one that was half full with clear liquid, sat in her rough hand. I walked to my mother and handed her my drawing of a butterfly. She laughed, and my heart jumped, for I thought I succeeded. You know, you have his face.

She said, the face of the devil that stole my innocence. Her fingers squeezed hard around the bottle. Bastard asked, why you like the most? The man who painted my roses. A color I did not want. She threw the paper into the fire. And when I thought maybe I could move, on? The bastard came back to haunt me. She lay back in her chair, letting the fire chew it up,

turning my picture to black and ash. All I could do was stare. Stare into the soul of the devil she claimed me to be. Stare at the cackling waves, this concoction of brewing hate, the laughing embers, aglowing. Red. But tomorrow is the week. weekend, I thought. Tomorrow I would enact my final plan, for the hope in me still burned, just as bright as the fire, that dared to extinguish it. Early in the morning, I set out with a glass jar into the fields and began searching for the perfect butterfly. Hours passed, and I finally crossed past what the butterfly covered in the same crimson color my mother loved. It was a difficult task, and the butterfly flew away many times. But at last, I captured the insect within my jar.

I was so joyous, for this was the perfect gift. She would look at me with those eyes again. I ran inside, panting like a dog, and showed my mother the butterfly in the jar. She ripped it out of my hands and stared at the fluttering bug, tapping against the glass. The anticipation was almost too much. My legs shook, and I smiled so wide. It hurt. What the hell is wrong with you?

She said with a voice sharper than the eyes I've grown so accustomed to. Her emerald pearls stung. Her face became a rippling pond as wrinkles formed within the beige skin. Damn you. Why can I be free? She shoved me away as if I were a dirty dog covered in trash, and I stumbled to the ground. Release it. She placed the jar on the floor and walked away.

How did that not work? I showed her a butterfly, yet she gave me the same look. I wasn't sure what to do anymore. I continued to think of an answer until I watched the butterfly fly out of the jar and towards the sun. I understood where I went wrong. Yes, for butterflies are free. and I took away that fundamental aspect, twisting the one thing my mother dreamed of. How foolish I was.

How stupid! I collapsed to the ground and lay within the green blades, letting the wind nuzzle across my body and the sun rest on me. Maybe I didn't understand my mother's dream. What was it that she wanted? Why did she look at the butterflies with such a little? envy. Did they have the things she wanted? I felt something fuzzy crawl onto my hand and swatted it away as I jolted up. I looked down and saw a caterpillar. It was fuzzy with rough hairs covering its entire body.

Its legs did not feel nice, not like the butterflies, and I scowled at the caterpillar as it crawled. I bet it wished it could fly. That's it. The answer was so perfect and so obvious. The caterpillar was my mother. My mother had rough hands. Her innocence had been stolen, and she admitted to not having freedom. And those eyes, that wrinkly face. They were not beautiful. She was not beautiful. Just like this caterpillar, ugly thing low to the ground. It disgusted me, with its hairs a dark red, such mockery, such pain to see. So I pressed hard on the crawling abomination, my emerald eyes stinging the caterpillar, glaring at it as if it only deserved the bottom of my shoe. Harder, harder, harder,

until it popped to be a butterfly, a caterpillar must hatch from its cocoon. I mumbled at the wind and grass, and even to the sun. They can hear me. I know they can. It was a Monday, and I usually hated Mondays. But today was different, and I skipped through the halls with a smile stamped across my face, too wide for my lips. My friends and even a teacher asked why I was so happy.

Honestly, I found it difficult to put such emotion into words, so I shrugged my shoulders, not as a way to say that I didn't know, for I knew exactly why. Every time I shrugged, I could feel how much lighter my shoulders felt. A weight had been lifted. I knew the answer.

I knew how to make my mother look at me with love. After school, my mother and I began our routine as we stood in the wind, its flute playing the most beautiful note. For now was the moment of her grace. I ran into the house and grabbed a kitchen knife. As I walked outside, I saw my mother gazing at the butterflies, her back facing me. I ran through the crunching grass and rammed the knife into her back.

She let out a joyous shout. Yes, for she understood what was happening. And to prove such, she fell on her back once I pulled the knife out, the metal dripping with my mother's blood. She exposed her most vulnerable side to me, telling me that this was the gift she wanted this entire time. So I stood atop her and plunged the knife into her stomach, into her chrysalis.

I stabbed many times, each consecutive strike stronger than the one before. Deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. Until her chest no longer rose. I dropped the knife, panting as sweat dripped from my forehead, and stood above my mother. I felt the wind cool me as it touched my sweat, and its flute was euphoric, like honey melting in my ears.

What a sweet song had played. And the lime-green blades of war had finished a battle won, for their swords were stained a crimson, red. They danced faster than ever before. I followed their remnants of victory and studied my mother. Her body was still frozen, yet... No, I must check. I bent down to touch her hand and they were, they were soft.

A tear almost fell, one holding every form of ecstasy, but there was still more that needed to be checked. I studied her body, this opened cocoon, and my eyes traced up her arms, past her neck, and finally to her face. She looked so innocent, so pure, wearing a frozen smile. And her eyes, those emerald pearls, they were wide. They held no hate, no disgust. Not even as I stood above them did they change, and my tears fell into hers. She was free. caressed her cheek with my hand and rubbed her face, kissing her forehead.

For that was the only way I knew how to say, you're welcome. God, her face. I was so used to seeing it wrinkled. But now it was loose. I never realized how beautiful my mother was. Maybe she never realized such a thing either. But now, I believe she did. So I wiped my eyes and sat next to my mother.

No, what was my mother? For my gift to her was a success. And we both gazed into the sun. We smiled at the star up above, and it smiled back, for it gained a new admirer. Another butterfly who would fly high into the sky, keeping it company,

but never too close. For my mother is soft, innocent, free, beautiful. 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 don't. 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 story's author.