Creepy - February 2021 Double Feature

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

I Am My Neighbor's Keeper was written by A. DeLaney and narrated by Cole Burkhardt***The Night the Power Went Out was written by Thousand-Thorns and narrated by Dexter Heron***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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please check out our reward tiers at patreon.com slash creepypod. Before we get to today's story, I have an announcement about this month. Now that we're officially in February, the creepy podcast will be celebrating both Black History Month and Women in Horror Months. How you ask? Every story that you hear during our Sunday full productions this month will only feature black and female writers and narrators. We'll rotate between the two.

This week will feature Black narrators and writers, next week we'll feature female writers and narrators and so on for the next four weeks. I've decided to step back from narratings and writers. Sunday stories just this month to maintain the atmosphere of inclusivity and support that we do our best at here. I will be narrating the Wednesday paired down bonus narrations, but all of our Sunday production focus will be on black and female creators. We've got some great stories lined up this month that I love and hope you do too. 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. Creepy Presents A Double Feature First, I am my neighbor's keeper, written by A. Delaney, narrated by Cole Burkart, and produced by Steve Blizzin. How did I end up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains after spending all of my life in Florida? A failed relationship, of course. Seems like a good idea at the time. All ideas sound like great ideas at 27.

The biggest pro at the time was, I did to start over in a new place with an instant support system. In retrospect, it was an opportunity to run away from my failed attempt at being in law enforcement because ACAB. I ended up moving into an apartment after two weeks of sleeping on the couch after finding out my long-distance girlfriend I'd moved to South Carolina for cheated on me. Not just once or twice, but a lot. I mean, if you're done a cheat, delete your text messages. After moving into apartment and breaking the lease on that same apartment less than a year later, I bought a house. I took some money for my pension, almost $14,000,

and decided to move from Greenville to Spartanburg. There was no way I was moving back to Florida, not after posting several pictures on social media with captions about how great my life was, and the hundred times I'd hashtag fall for Greenville, often posing next to the waterfall in Reedy Park on Main Street, or knocking back one too many at Velofellow. The house I bought was a small bundalow in the heart of Hampton Heights, a historic and almost gentrified neighborhood. I remember riding that it was point four miles from downtown to my dad and that he should visit. The only thing missing was a whole foods and a mom jogging way too fast

with those annoying jotting strollers. The yard was bare, except for a towering oak, and a beat-up metal roof shed in the backyard. The home needed some extra work, too. A small but expensive list included a new H-Fatch system, the crawl space needed to be insulated, and a new chimney. Needless to say, I loved that little house. It was built in 19-fatch. with dark original wood floors and the original French doors. It even had a screened-in porch. With two bedrooms and one bath, the layout of having one room lead into another with no hallways made it feel bigger than its 954 square feet. Just bit enough and cheap enough for a struggling single millennial.

The only downfall about the house is that I had to share a driveway with my neighbors. They weren't bad people. They were actually really kind. Just loud, boisterous, and definitely renters. The only time it really mattered was during meetings when I worked from home, and the base would rattle my office windows a bit. My new neighbor, Mr. Ellis, I would learn from getting his mail in my mailbox later that day, was a stout black man with a patchy beard and small brown eyes.

The first time I met him, I was sitting up the front yard with a brand new shovel I'd bought preparing to seat it and put mulch along the facade of the house. I had watched seven videos on YouTube and considered myself an expert gardener at the time. I figured red mulch would contrast great with the pale army green of the house and complement the red door, practically a young Black Martha Stewart in training. Hey, neighbor. He'd rowled from behind the cigarette smoke he had stalled. He was sitting on the front porch of his small orange house.

I waved after dropping the red mulch on the ground and smiled, most of which had been spilled out in the batch seat of my Ford Fusion. You know your house is haunted. He blew more smoke out of his mouth and smiled as his bulbous stomach bounced underneath a dirty white shirt and a chuckle rolled out of his gut. Is that right? Yeah, I used to live there for 15 years. The guy that bought it in 2016 let me keep renting it till he sold it to you. Oh, okay.

I brushed off my hands and placed them on my hips. You, Mr. Ellis? I think I have your mail. Yeah, that's me. You can keep the mail. It's just bills. Why are you doing the yard? You don't have a man to do it? He coughed, wiped his wide forehead, and continued to ramble old man bullshit, not waiting for me to respond. Yeah, you know, well, now that I think of it, that grass will. won't grow none. He said, leaning forward in his white lawn chair and pointing two thick short

fingers in my direction. It'll grow. I told him as I walked back to the car as I rolled my eyes. He stood up to lean over the railing to his porch and watched me grabbing another bag of mulch. Hey, girl. Did this asshole really just call me a girl? I thought and shook him a look. Where's your accent? People from Florida. don't have one. I grimace to smile under the weight of the mulch. Well, well, well, never been there. It'd never been nowhere, seen as I'm here all day. How about I look out for your place and you for mine? I pointed up at the cameras I installed. We'll do, neighbor. I mimic his southern drawl, and it induced a hearty chuckle from him. We didn't really talk much after that. I spent the next few

hours tilling the yard. It was difficult to do so on five-pitched slope in the front yard. As I dodged on the right side of the yard underneath that old oat, I found a rusted railroad spike. I dammed it closely and threw it with the rest of the weeds. I found the brownish black object out of place. The railroad tracks were about a mile away, so I doodled it on my phone. Railroad spikes in lawns. What I found in my rabbit hole of the internet was trouble. Railroad spites were used in hoodoo. Low-country hoodoo. What I haphazardly removed for my yard was part of a protection spell,

one of four spites that were supposed to be in one of the four corners of the perimeter of my lawn. I immediately placed the stake back into the yard. Bang the flat portion of the shovel on top? As I did so, I noticed Mr. Ellis in his old white plastic lawn chair intently watching me, smiling. I shook my head and walked into the house. I'm sure this old guy was fucking with me, but I had to know more about this house. My research led me to the slave narratives,

which is archived in the Library of Congress. 17 volumes of microfilms of slave narrative transcripts at my fingertips. The amount of melancholy flavored pride I felt to have a history, but in this context was hard to mull over. I searched South Carolina and three hours, hours later, listed in small print, was a narrative from 1938 of a recently freed slave with my address. In broken English, I read the story that a young girl told about her father. He was a reckless and a drunk, never wanting to leave the house.

She explained this was out of character because he was always in good nature and intended on moving the family to Chicago. She suspected the Drayton mill owner hired a witch doctor. of sorts to keep him and the other workers from leaving and skipping out on paying him back his loans. Turns out, the mill owner lived in a Victorian mansion one street south of me. These bundalows were the housing for sharecroppers and factory workers to pack their large families in and work at the textile mill. The girl went on to explain that a neighbor man placed a hets on him. Her mother first sent for a doctor, and then when that didn't work, a seeker.

The seeker told him to ditter on the front door for a hets bag that may have been buried there. The girl explained once her father stepped over it, he was bound by the hets to the house. The next step was to dip his feet in running river water, to wash away the ties of the hats. From the looks of the reading, it didn't seem like her father got any better or ever left Spartan Bird. I remember staring at my phone for a long time after reading the narrative. Glassy-eyed from the days' lawn work and research, I definitely needed a beer and a shower. I hung the accordion paper curtains I bought with the mulch in the master bedroom facing my new neighbor's house, in anticipation for getting dressed after my shower.

He kind of creeped me out. I got out of the shower, set my alarm, and checked both the front and back door before settling in the bed for sleep. My sore muscles thanked me as I fell into a fitful sleep. Beep, beep! Front door! Open! My home alarm! I shot out of my sleep and grabbed my Block 22 Gen 4 out of my nightstand. The adjustable grip nestled snugly in the cradle between my thumb and the trigger.

I walked to the bedroom door that led to the living room. The front door was wide open. I closed the front door and let the darkness act as my cover. The small home was easy to clear. There was nothing or no one in the house. I checked the cameras and nothing. I checked up to a draft, but I was certain I checked the doors. The next day, I changed the lots to the door.

in the early morning. Mr. Ellis watched me from his porch, smiled, and waved. I nodded and got ready for my day working from home. I hadn't unpacked much besides the desk and used a dining room chair to set up my small office at the back of the home. The office was bright and had no curtains. I didn't buy enough. The kids from the school in the back cheered and streamed on the playground. I smiled and looked out my window. My shed door was open. I stood up, and a dan got my gun. I checked the shed, which was empty except for the yard tools. Nothing was missing.

This guy was totally fudding with me. I put the gun in my waistband and flipped my shirt over it. Grabbing the mail from the living room, watching next door, I knocked on the door. Who's that not, and like the police? A hosty woman's voice answered the door shortly after. Hey, I'm Elise. I live next door. Is Mr. Ellis home?

I doubt his mail. I impatiently rattled off. I was going to give him a peace of my mind. Oh, no, Mr. Ellis died. Don't no man live here. My son moved out a long time ago, she smiled worriedly. You okay, honey? Yeah, yeah.

I looked down at the mail and felt a bit lightheaded. I guess I'll throw this mail away. Sure enough, the camera footage showed the shed door slide open by itself. I walked back to my house, defeated, and put away my block. I grabbed the old dusty Bible my mom had given me and opened it to Psalms. I walked around to each stake in the yard and read all 150 Psalms over the course of the next week. The weeks following, I burned so much sage and Paulo Santo. Darts smudges from the smote gathered around the crown molding on the plaster.

It was a pain to did it off the high ceilings. I was certain my new neighbors thought, I was crazy. Maybe I am. Either way, I'm sure Mr. Ellis still lives in the house. Actually, I know he has never laughed. After a while, I just got used to it. When I was in the shower, I would ask him to leave, and he would begrudgingly oblige. I spoke to him a lot when I was lonely. Sometimes I saw him on the porch next door and would smile or wave when no one else was looking. Until this day, my doors never stayed closed. I'm just not sure I can ever leave. Went out, written by Thousand Thorns, narrated by Dexter Heron, and produced by Steve Blizzin. I used to work at the local morgue,

bringing corpses in for embalming in preparation to be sent to whichever funeral home they're going to. It was a morbid task, as you can imagine. People say that working with the deceased were long periods of time can have a negative psychological effect on you. I do believe this to be true. However, one's mind also becomes used to the task and accepts that this is what you're being paid to do, and you just have to get it done. My colleague, James, was the same. Going through the same mundane, morbid routines was made a little more bearable with him

around, though. We could crack a joke and laugh, distract ourselves with horsing around, or just talking about random trash with no real meaning. We even used to stash beers in one of the freezers during the late shift, when it was just the two of us, and we'd crack one open here and there in between moving bodies around, tagging them and storing them, signing them in on the registry. One night in particular, we were bringing in a man who was identified as Mr. Anton Sullivan. He had been involved in a car accident and had died at the scene of a severe head injury. We pulled our van up at the entrance and James jumped out and unlocked the back doors while I locked up the front of the van.

We then lifted the stretcher with the black body bag on it out of the van, setting up the wheels as we did so. I took the keys from James and locked the doors while he rolled the stretcher inside into the elevator. I just finished locking up when I jumped a foot in the air due to my phone ringing. suddenly in my pocket. My wife always called to say goodnight when I was doing the late shift. I took the call and spoke to her while walking towards the building. When I was inside, I saw the elevator doors were closed and the number above the elevator read B. James had gone down ahead of me, so I recalled the elevator and finished the call with my wife while I waited. The elevator reached me just as I put my phone in my pocket. The all-too-familiar dinged

sounded and the doors opened. I was a little surprised to find the stretcher standing there in the elevator with James, nowhere in sight. He must have been distracted when he got out of the elevator and the door is closed before he could get the stretcher out. Upon reaching the bottom floor, the door is opened and almost immediately the lights went out. Just pitch black. My heart actually seized for a moment when they did as I was suddenly plunged into the lights. suffocating darkness and silence. The floor was underground and so it was only natural for it to be pitch black without the lights on. I turned on the flashlight on my phone so I could see and called out to James. There was no reply. I called out for him again and

there was still nothing so I decided to call his cell. It rang a few times and then the call was picked up. James? I said into the phone. He didn't say anything. I couldn't hear any sounds on the other end, no breathing, no sound from the cooling system which you could always hear. That was no surprise, seeing as the power was out. I still should have heard something, anything. There was nothing. James, come on, man. If you're messing around, just quit it, okay? We agreed. We wouldn't mess around on the job like this. It isn't funny. I said sternly. I jumped at the sudden sound of my name. It was so garbled that I almost didn't catch it,

but it was definitely my name. James? Where are you now? Are you looking for the generator? There was a moment of scratchy static in my ear, pretty loud, and I had to move the phone away from my ear. James said, his voice washed out by horrible static.

What? I can't hear you. You're breaking up, I said. Free... Free... Free... Free... ...reiser room?

I asked. This was answered with three beeps and then silence as the call died. Damn it! I said to no one in particular. I used the light on my phone to see down the hallway and made my way to the freezer room to find out why James was there and not checking to see why the backup generator hadn't kicked in. In the freezer room, I bowed myself in the grip of a sudden creeping. fear. Every door of every one of the freezers were wide open. I stood, stocked still at the doorway,

too afraid to move any further. It was so dark all around me, and I was suddenly afraid of everywhere around me that I couldn't see, and even more afraid of where I could see. I wanted to call out to James, but something made me too scared to do so. I didn't want to be heard. I don't know how I hadn't immediately noticed it, but I became aware of the faint sound of shuffling coming from somewhere further into the room where my measly cell phone flashlight couldn't reach. The shuffling sound of footsteps.

Footsteps from more than one pair. I was paralyzed with pure terror, unable to believe my senses. I so badly wanted to run screaming, but I couldn't. That was until I saw movement, somewhere, just out of reach of my light source. I was about to stammer out James' name when I saw another movement, off to the left of the one I'd already seen. And another. That was when I screamed. I just screamed and turned around, running back to the elevator, filled with horror and struggling to process what was happening.

What was happening was impossible, but it was happening somehow. The human mind struggles to comprehend such things. Its one focus is getting out and getting as far away as possible. You can't think of anything else at the time. I reached the elevator and shouted in dismay when I realized the control panel was dead because the backup power hadn't activated for some reason. I can never put into enough words the absolute soul-crushing terror

I experienced when I turned back to the same. turned back to the door and the light from my phone illuminated a shape in the corner of the elevator. Literally two steps away from me. The shape of a black body bag standing upright and somehow quivering. The last thing I remember is hearing a horrific gurgling noise from inside the bag, followed by a disgusting, fleshy, squelching sound and a liquid splattering like some form of liquid hitting the floor. After that, I was gone.

I don't think my mind could take it anymore. I woke up in the hospital two days later, and when I was okay to talk, the police came and explained everything to me. Or they tried their best to explain. According to them, I'd been found lying out. outside the elevator, having fainted due to extreme stress. They found James inside the body bag in the elevator, dead.

They had been deeply disturbed by the fact that James and all of his internal organs had somehow become separated. The body bag that he was in was saturated with almost all of his blood, his organs swimming in the wave of blood that seeped out when they opened the bag. The corpses that had been stored in the morgue were all gone without a trace. a trace. The day crew had found us when they came to relieve James and I from the night duty and immediately called the police. The officers at the scene were heavily traumatized at the site after the body bag had been opened by one of the paramedics that also responded. All police

and emergency personnel were issued extensive counseling, and the same counseling was suggested to me. I accepted it, but I found it to be a waste of time. It's been years now. I've decided I need to at least write about this. I'll still never forget it. Whatever happened to James that night will forever be a mystery. I'll never understand. I accept that. In a way, I'm kind of okay with it.

Maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe we all are. For more information, including pictures and videos, of the stories told on this podcast, please visit creepypod.com. If you'd like to submit a story for consideration or recommend a story, please see our submission page at creepypod.com slash submissions. All stories told on this podcast are done so through creative comments, share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors, no portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast

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