Creepy - Never Trap a Kobold in Your House

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

You've been warned...***Written by: Porphyria and Narrated by: Alicia Atkins***Bonus Episode: "The Trapdoor House" written by Ryan Peacock***Find our reward tiers and how to get your bonus magnet at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Sound Design by Steve Blizin of Black Crow Audio***Title music by Alex Aldea 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.

Welcome to the Bloody Disgusting Network. This podcast has made possible thanks to our patrons. Please join me in welcoming and thanking new patrons. Ronnie Bankson, Matthew McGowan, Colin O'Neill, and KynM. All of our patrons get immediate access to all Sunday and Wednesday productions early and commercial free. The reward tiers go up from there to include instant access to over 500 stories and counting, not to mention the four news stories edit every week. There's also logo merch tiers whose proceeds go to suicide prevention charities.

And if you sign it for the yearly membership, you get 12 months for the price of 11 as a special thanks. To see how you can support the podcast and get rewarded, and for your rewards to have an impact on others, please check out the donation to us at patreon.com slash creepypod. And it occurred to me last week that as of February 19th, creepy officially passed our five-year anniversary. So, as a celebration, I, um, well, I forgot that this was happening. so I didn't plan anything. So how about we just keep making more content? Over the last five years, we've posted over 600 episodes,

accounting for I don't know how many actual stories. We've gone from posting a story every week or so to posting four stories per week, free to everyone. And we haven't missed a Sunday release in over four and a half years. So yeah, five years has gone pretty fast. So I guess all I can say is thanks. Thanks for listening. Thanks to the new listeners who've just found us and the long-time listeners who've put up with me all these years.

Clearly, you have high thresholds for both horror and pain. I also know y'all aren't really here to hear me ramble. So, a better way to celebrate five years than to say... No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing and disturbing creepy pastoral. 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. Never trap a cobald in your house.

Written by Porphyria and narrated by Alicia Atkins. Waking up each morning to coffee and fresh-baked loaves is not courtesy of my wife. For starters, I get up for work before my wife, Nadina, to avoid clashing in our single bathroom, and I usually leave the house just as she's starting her coffee, 45 minutes later. The mysterious appearance of breakfast only started about a week ago. I am definitely not complaining.

It has seriously helped me in the morning. giving me a bit of extra time to enjoy breakfast rather than shoving some half-burnt toast in my mouth as I leave the house. I should probably mention that this is not the only unusual but pleasant event that has happened in our house recently. So, my wife and I didn't freak out when we first smelt that delicious scent of fresh bread wafting up the stairs like an invitation, delivered directly to our nostrils on a lazy Sunday morning. Four months ago was another story. Sunday morning started with confusion, followed by the kind of paranoia that trickles slowly into your consciousness, and eventually sends you into a panicked frenzy.

The previous night we'd gone to bed early as neither of us felt well, and we'd hoped we weren't getting the flu that seemed to be taking our town by storm. We had also both drunk, spoiled milk by accident, which really didn't help how we felt. Needless to say, we were both too tired and weak to even do the daily house chores, including sweeping a lot of flaky bits off the kitchen floor that had just appeared, like a mouse had chomped through a block of wood. We could deal with it all tomorrow. When we got up on that Sunday morning, the kitchen was spotless.

I stared open-mouthed at Nadina, expecting her to say something. When she did, it wasn't what I expected. Kate, did you do this? She asked. No. I said, with a slothed, slightly astonished tone in my voice. I thought you did.

Silence fell between us as we looked around the kitchen. Eventually, she suggested we checked the rest of the house to see if we had been burgled. We started to check all the windows and doors for signs of entry, and then drawers and cupboards to see if anything was missing. After a thorough search, we could not find a sign of forced entry or any of our possessions missing. My suggestion to call the police made Nadina a laugh. Apparently telling the police that our house had been broken into and tidied up was not an option. At least I could raise a smile from her beautiful face during this weird situation. We reconvened in the lounge with coffee and toast

and theorized about what had happened while I made a fire to heat the room for the day. The fireplace had been one of the main things that had attracted us to this old house. Well, that and the couple of acres of land that came with it, It was rural, but close enough to town to be convenient. Things started to go wrong when we got onto the subject of people spying on us and stalkers. This is when the fear started to quickly seep into my mind like a slow trickle of water making a new path. What if someone was watching us, monitoring our every move? I reached for a magazine and pen on the coffee table and scribbled a note on one of the pages.

Searched the house for cameras. It read, the note from the room as I showed it to Nadina trying to be discreet as possible. We spent over an hour looking for cameras in our house like we were spies in a movie trying to debug a room. We must have looked ridiculous if anyone was watching, but, at the time, the thought of a stranger invading our privacy, watching our every move was terrifying. When the phone rang, we both nearly jumped out of our skin. We stared at the phone, not daring to answer. Was it a warning?

The phone kept ringing, and in a flash, Nadina grabbed it and answered. She always had more courage than me. It was her that asked me out in the first place after weeks of flirting. It was her that proposed to me in front of the astronomical clock in Prague on a weekend away. Her face relaxed and she smiled. It was her mother. I don't know if the normality of Nadina's mother doing her dutifully weekly Sunday chats that defused a situation in our house. But as I listened to her chat away in her native German time,

I relaxed. I had tried to learn German when I first met her, and after we got married, but I just did not have the knack for languages. I didn't need it much in the good old US of A anyway. So I let my beloved's native tongue get the better of me and gave up. After 20 minutes, she hung up the phone and turned to me with a smile. My mother thinks we have a cobald in the house. I laughed nervously, having absolutely no idea what she was talking about, and she continued.

It's a German legend, a house spirit that helps around the house as long as you treat it nicely. My laughter turned from a nervous chuckle into a full snort of hilarity, and Adina and I stood by the phone with tears of laughter pouring down our faces. My mother-in-law was always imparting her dramatic folklore's onto us. This one was the most ridiculous I had heard so far. Out of curiosity, we ended up on the internet to look up exactly what a cobald was. One of the things that my wife have in common is the love of myths, legends, and fantasy. We were just interested to see exactly what her mom was talking about.

After about a half an hour of more laughter and several impressions of what we thought a cobald would do or look like, I found some information that actually seemed to make Nadina's mom sound half right. We weren't looking for proof of cobalds actually existing. It was the fantasy element that made us start our search. The website stated that a cobald could be called to the house whether you wanted it there or not. The misdievous little sprite would leave woodchips on your floor and spoilt milk in the house. If you drink the milk and leave the wood chips, the cobald might consider you a good master. If you leave food for it, it'll help you around the house as payment.

We joked and talked about folklore tales for the rest of the day, but the conversation kept coming back to the cobald. We had found wood bits on the floor. we had drunk spoiled milk, and we had left our food out on our plates. Each time we dismissed the idea as ludicrous and moved on. By the time bedtime rolled around, we had pretty much debated and laughed our way through all the folk tales we knew. As I went to climb the stairs to bed, I caught in a Dina leaving a sandwich out on the kitchen table. She turned to face me and winked.

Just in case, she said with a cheeky grin. So, the last four months progressed from there, really. I'm not sure when the acceptance of it all settled into my mind. I went from humoring Nadina for leaving food out to doing a few experiments to see if items in the house would be tidied away. And then we just sort of quietly accepted it. How do you accept something impossible? I still don't know what I would do if I came into contact with the mythical creature. Just try and think what you would do?

Nothing bad had happened to us. About a week ago we started making extra meals and leaving treats for our house sprite. This is when the coffee and extra treats started in the morning for us. Things, obviously, took a turn for the worst shortly after that, or I would not be writing this. Please, take this as a warning. We decided we wanted to know what our houseguests looked like.

It was meant to be a friendly gesture so that we could meet it properly. One night, we decided to stay awake and hide like two little kids in a closet so that we could see it. As usual, we laid out some food, did our nighttime ritual, but, rather than going to bed, we crept downstairs and hid behind the door to the basement. That night, we saw nothing and heard nothing. The meal was left untouched and there was no breakfast surprise for us waiting on the kitchen table. Disappointed, we got ready to go to the supermarket as we do on every Saturday morning. and during the drive, I flicked through the websites trying to see how we could make our cobald appear.

I would hate anyone to look at my web history. I would look like a nutcase. My search turned up nothing other than writing a letter to it. We chatted about ways we could trick the creature into showing itself. A trail of breadcrumbs kind of thing to borrow from another German tale. Nadina suggested a webcam. We both got very excited by this idea. These were old mythical from the olden times. Surely we could fool them with a webcam. The webcam idea turned into us splashing out on a home nest cam system controlled by our phones. You know the brand I'm talking about. Besides, it would work with our TV too, so we justified our purchase that way. Not too crazy ladies buying cameras to capture a mythical creature. When we got home, we stashed

the cold stuff in the freezer and fridge and started to set up the camera system and sink it with our Wi-Fi. When we started to unpack the rest of the dry groceries, I discovered that I could not find my purse anywhere. I must have left it at one of the shops in the mall. After no luck with any of the stores, I filed a report with the cops and canceled my cards. It was an inconvenience, but these things happen, right? That night we went to bed as normal, and Nadina woke me up early with excitement.

She wanted to check the camera footage from the night before. As we made our way downstairs, she tripped on a shoe and half fell and half stumbled down the rest of the stairs, spraining her ankle on the way. After a lot of TLC for her ankle, we didn't get around to checking the cameras until late morning. We flicked through the night on double speed until the footage suddenly jumped forward three hours. We obviously replayed the footage, but there was a section missing. Disappointed, we chalked it up to a Wi-Fi glitch. This glitch in the sense, system went on for a few nights. I think it was until the Tuesday night. We had had a run of bad

luck those few days. Nadina's ankle was still painful in our laundry washing machine and malfunctioned, causing a flood in the kitchen. And then they had announced redundancies at my work, leaving us worried about my future at the company. Still, every night we left food for our cobald and dutifully checked the footage from the cameras in the morning before work. We never saw our little helper. We were also not getting fresh coffee and bread anymore, and most of the food we left out was not eaten. But we had not really thought about it with the other little things going on in our lives. On the Wednesday, Nadina went to the doctors about her ankle, and he prescribed a week's rest off of work. During this time, she decided to crochet a pair of socks for our house guest,

in a Harry Potter-style gesture, and she even named it. Our cold bold was now to be called Darcy, as we didn't actually know if it was male or female. It was at this point, things in our household took a turn for the worse. The day after the socks were left out for Darcy, we awoke to find that all of our plates, cups, and bowls in the kitchen were smashed, and all the chairs from the ground floor were out in the garden. Even the couch. It was weird and distressing.

As Nadina limped outside, we sat on the nearest chairs and cried. We had something in our house, something magical and otherworldly, and we had appeared to have made it angry. What had we done? I called in sick at work, and we both hit the internet hard to try and find information. Where else would you go to find out about myths and legends? Libraries don't stock those kinds of books anymore. We got snippets of information from various sites, but there was nothing solid about making a cobald angry, or how to get rid of one. I suggested that Nadina call her mother.

Surely she would know something. Her mother's information was not good. I could hear her tongue clicking and making a tutting sound in disbelief at what we had done. We had really messed up. Apparently, cobalds can become mischievous and cause trouble when upset. We had learned that much from the internet. But giving one a gift and naming the creature was highly offensive to them. We were not freeing Darcy like the house elf and Harry Potter.

We were cursing ourselves. The Colbald was now out to get us. Living in fear is not something I thought I would ever have to do. We tried to make amends with the Colbald. We made a whole meal for it that night and left it out in the kitchen with some wine and a napkin with the words, We Are Sorry, written on it. Can these things read? But apparently the damage had already been done.

The next morning we tend to do. tiptoed down the stairs to see if our peace offering had been accepted, only to find that our favorite room in the house, the cozy sitting room with the fireplace, had been completely trashed, including the solid oak wood floor that had been ripped up and left in pieces. I sat down on the threshold to the room with my feet in the space where our floor used to be and sobbed uncontrollably. I don't know if it was the shock of what had happened or the whole situation in general that made me break down.

Nadina was quiet. Eventually I calmed down and realized we needed to do something to get rid of this thing. I turned to face my wife, who was just staring with a look on her face that told me she was not really with me at this moment. I gently reached out and touched her arm and her eyes refocused onto me. We need to trap it and kill it. She said, like she had read my mind and instantly offered a solution. We both called in sick for the rest of the week at work. We had a different kind of work ahead of us.

My laptop was destroyed in the sitting room, so we huddled up in the bedroom using our phones and Adina's computer to look for traps to capture mythical creatures. We looked at goblins, elves, trolls, sprites, gnomes, and many more beings trying to gather as much information as possible. It turns out that the word cobald is quite an umbrella term for many Hausgeister, or house ghost in Germany. And, apparently in a town called Leipzig,

in the Saxony region of Germany, they found a way to steal and sell them, but there was no other information available. Wild with frustration, we changed our search criteria to what cobalds like. We thought we could lure it into a trap. Yes, we had stopped calling it Darcy pretty much immediately after we had spoken to my German mother-in-law.

It was an immediate unwritten rule that my wife and I had adopted. Several hours later we had pulled a plan together that was, and our frantic mindset, seemed like a good one. Colbalds like a meal of bread and buttermilk soup. They are also extremely fond of beer. We left out beer for the Colbald that night and a hope of calming it down. It was too late and getting too dark outside to get to the store. We would have to find the other stuff to make a soup tomorrow.

And, to be perfectly honest, neither of us wanted to leave the house in fear of what we would come back to. We also didn't want to be alone in the house while the other people. person went to the store. We didn't sleep well, and every single noise woke us from our unsettled sleep. We wanted to wait until daylight before venturing downstairs. Finally, the sun came up, and the second the golden light trickled over the horizon, we were out of bed. It was a strange feeling of dread and hope that we were feeling, the dread of walking down to another terrible situation, and the hope that we had appeased the coal-bald with the beer. We tended to

made our way downstairs and entered the kitchen. The beer was gone. We looked about expecting the worst around every corner. There was nothing. To be fair, there was not a lot left on the ground floor that we could lose. We thought we had done it, tamed the beast that was in our home. Feeling confident on our victory, my brain suddenly hatched a plan. We would serve the creature for a few days and win back its trust,

and then trap it and dispose of it. I shared my idea with Nadina. She thought for a moment and asked, How will we trap it and what will we do with it? Without hesitation, I said, we kill it. This obviously didn't answer the question of how we would trap it, but we ran with the idea. I had to go back to work,

but Nadina still had the excuse of her ankle to take another day off. I got a text at work from Nadina saying she had a way to trap it, our house pest. I immediately went to the staff break room to call her. She had asked a few of her friends in Germany to search cobalds on the internet, her theory being that our search results were going to be different based on location, and other internet tracking things I don't really understand. One of the websites that she had a link for said that beer, buttermilk, and a specially made hiding place for it, would make it feel more comfortable. If we could make the hiding place into a trap, we could capture our house troll. By the time I had got home, Nadina had drawn up a full-scale

plan similar to some kind of feral animal trap. It was all based on a pressure point. When the Colbald lifted the beer or ate the food, it would close the door to the trap through the difference and weight on the mechanism. It would require a few blankets to make it look homely, and a decent spot in the wreck of our house to make it look like a hiding hole. On the way home from work, I called in at the supermarket for the buttermilk in the hardware store to pick up a sizable animal trap. We really didn't know how big or small this thing was, but I didn't want to take any chances. We spent the evening setting up the cage and decorating it with blankets. We decided that one of the remaining kitchen cupboards would be a good place to put it.

We removed the central shelf and we could just fit the trap in sideways and close the doors. That night, and for four nights after that, we put the trap in the cupboard with the buttermilk and the beer, but did not set the trap. All of our offerings were gone in the morning, and nothing malevolent happened in our house. We were still not getting any real sleep, but we felt like we were winning. We could beat this thing and move on with our lives. Finally, as the weekend rolled around again, we agreed it was time to set the trap. We pressurized the door and put out the beer and buttermilk as we had been doing all week. This was the moment we thought would be our penultimate step to ridding ourselves of the cobald.

At 3.15 in the morning, we awoke to a noise that sounded like screaming, but both high and low pitched at the same time. The noise rolled and bounced from our left to our right side, and then below us and above. I had never heard anything like it. A sound that moved around the house like a surround sound system on hyperdrive. It was deafening. We knew we had succeeded in trapping the creature,

and well, relief is not the right word, but maybe the confirmation we had done something was enough to get us up and moving downstairs. On the way downstairs, I grabbed an umbrella from the stand. I think it was for a defense. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We tentatively entered the kitchen and approached the cupboard. The door was all the way open

and the cage covered in the blanket was shaking violently. Pointing the umbrella like a weapon at the cage, I whispered to Nadine and to... pushed the blanket off. The creature inside was slamming itself around the cage while somersaulting like a trapped monkey. Its appearance kept changing from the grotesque troll to something you would imagine a gnome or a leprechaun to look like in a book or TV show. With every role it did in the cage, it changed shape. What the hell do we do now? said Nadina. We had not really thought this plan through to the end. While we stared at the cage, the Colbaude suddenly stopped moving

like it had just noticed us. It took the form of a little person wearing traditional German Liederhausen on, complete with a little leather hat. It seemed to look us both directly in the eyes at the same time and smiled. A smile too wide, too big, with many, many teeth.

It picked up a piece of shattered glass that had contained its buttermilk and licked the milk residue off the shard. Blood trickled from its mouth as it cut its raw-looking tongue. As it licked its lips, its mouth and teeth became bloody and grinned at us again. I threw the blanket back over the cage. I was beyond, freaked out. A noise started to come from under the blanket in the cupboard.

It was a scratching, something scratching on wood. We just stood there paralyzed with fear. I kept thinking that what we had done was the wrong thing. But we had to do something, didn't we? From inside the cage the creature started to pull the blanket off. It was covered in blood and still grinning. On the wall of the cupboard that was closest to one of the sides of the cage, it had scratched the words,

Do Hashmish. The Colbald placed its hands on the cage so that it was facing us, and then shifted into a grotesque troll form. It was naked with skin that looked scarred all over from burns. An old raised scarred tissue on its chest, the words to haste land were carved

Nadina started crying uncontrollably What does it say I asked She could not reply She was sobbing and slowly collapsing to the floor I grabbed her

Held her face What does it say? I demanded shaking her slightly And looking straight at her As her breaths heaved And tears covered her face She croaked out

You've got me. You have misery. It was 4.30 in the morning when I poured the final gasoline trail from her front door to about a meter into the garden and flicked the match. Nadina and I sat at the far end

of our front garden, watching our house burn. Our home and the coal-balled in it. I didn't want to take any more chances. We had seriously angered the creature and there was no going back. We had collected a few

Keepsakes and essentials from the house and decided it was the best thing to do. I just pray that the cobald creature does not end up at your house, looking like it had been burnt before. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents, The Trapp Door House, written by Ryan Peacock. When I was 12 years old, my family moved to Falkland. Calling that place to town might be a little too generous. There wasn't much there, but a lot of farmland and endless country highways lined with distant houses. Depending on what part of the highway you were on, some of them were nice enough that you might call them mansions with their big pretentious gates and fountains.

Anyone who thinks they need a gate or a fountain at their house probably isn't as important as they think they are. But I digress. Along some of the more heavily-forced stretches of the highway, that rain in the rain. through Falkland were a bunch of smaller older houses. The one of my family moved into was one of those. It wasn't run down or anything, just older. A century home, the realtor called it. They needed some updates and my family was willing to put the money into it.

My dad had something of an obsession with DIY, so anything with a project to do was perfect for him. Personally, I would have passed on the place. Its problems are a little too much for me. I still don't know what he thought he saw in it. I didn't like the place. It wasn't just that we were leaving home. I remember thinking from day one that the layout of that place was just odd.

I guess I built houses differently a hundred years ago. I'd noticed some of the same peculiarities in some of the other old houses. houses we looked at, but the one we bought was easily the strangest. The upstairs consisted of a landing big enough for one person to stand in, with three bedrooms and one bathroom coming off of it. Both my bedroom and the bathroom had small doors in them that led into the attic, and every time I had to open it, I could have sworn I felt the insulation burning my eyes. I could have lived with that, though. The bedrooms were incredibly spacious, and with a fresh coat of paint, it would have been just fine.

The basement was the weirdest part, though. It was only accessible through a trap door in the kitchen, and it wasn't tall enough for anyone of average height to stand up straight in. But despite the height, it inexplicably had a fucking toilet on a raised platform facing the ladder down. All these years later. and I still haven't figured why the hell they put a toilet there. But I digress. Aside from the toilet, the only other things in the basement were the furnace, the water heater, a couple of sink faucets that didn't have a basin beneath them,

and another trapdoor that had been painted over. My dad had tried to open it after we moved in. He said he'd figured it was either a crawl space that lived beneath the house or additional storage. Whatever it was, he'd never actually had any luck. It was sealed tight and eventually he gave up on it. It wasn't worth ripping apart the basement for. Not yet anyway. I remember the first night we stayed in that house.

I couldn't sleep. The movers had brought my bed up from my room and my dad had helped me put it back together. But it didn't really feel like it was my bed. I remember looking at the shapes of the still-packed boxes of my things in the moonlight coming through my window and feeling out of place, I suppose, like I was trespassing somewhere. Maybe that's normal when you uproot your life for the first time. But it was bad enough that even as tired as I was, I couldn't manage to sleep. I'd mentioned it to my dad the next day and he told me that eventually I'd come to see the Falkland House is home. I remember hoping that he was right.

And knowing deep down in my gut that he wasn't, I think it was during the first or second week that I began noticing that things seemed to move around when nobody was around in that house. We'd go out for the evening for some reason and when we'd come back, I'd notice that the close. in my closet had been moved around. Not rearranged or anything, just moved. As if someone had gone through them. I think one or two things might have been missing too. A few shirts, a pair of jeans. Things that I'd noticed but might not think too much about.

Once we came home after going out to dinner and after going up to my room, I remember noticing that my desk chair was pulled out. And some of my things looked as if they'd been tough. hudged. It wasn't anything obvious. I hadn't exactly memorized the position of everything. It just looked different, as if someone else sat at my desk. It was crazy. I know it was, but I remember that I just couldn't get the thought of someone else living in our house out of my head. And I never said anything to my family, of course. Even if I did, they would have just dismissed it. Distressed 12-year-olds aren't really the most reliable witnesses. And for what

seemed like such a small, trivial thing, I probably wouldn't have listened to me either. Even when I started hearing sounds in the house in night, I don't know if anyone would have believed me. Old houses make noises. Anyone can tell you that. Even at 12, it's what I told myself, when I heard the noises in the walls. Scraping sounds as if someone was moving just behind them. The creeks of old wood and what I could have sworn were footsteps somewhere downstairs. It had to just be in my imagination, right? My mind playing tricks on itself as I lay awake in my bed, unable to get comfortable.

I remember the night when I got out of bed. After realizing that there was no way in hell I was going to get any sleep, My brain wouldn't shut off. The house had been making noise earlier, but now all just seemed too quiet. I figured I'd watch some TV or something. I'd done it before, at our old house whenever I couldn't sleep. I'd get some water or juice and just sort of curl up on the couch. Last time I'd found some old 1960 superhero cartoons that were kind of neat to watch.

so I wanted to see if I could find that channel again. I crept down the stairs into the kitchen, and as I did I heard noises deeper in the house. The scrape of movement inside the walls that might have just been mice, although I could have sworn that it sounded like something a lot bigger. I was near the bottom of the stairs when I heard what was unmistakably the sound of footsteps. Heavy upon the linoleum kitchen floor. floor. Someone was walking around in there. Immediately I froze. Was someone else in the house awake?

No. Now I'd heard my dad snoring in his bedroom and I would have noticed if mom left to go downstairs. It couldn't be them. From my vantage point on the stairway I saw a light come from the kitchen as someone opened the fridge. And I heard the shuffling footsteps as the unknown figure walked around. Slowly I crept down the stairs, making a point to be as quiet as I possibly could. I had to know who was in there. I had to see them for myself. All I had to do was peek around the corner and I'd have my answer. It would have been simple.

And I reasoned that if I was seen, I could rush back upstairs before they could catch me. I reached the bottom step and peeked out into the kitchen. in the dim light from the fridge. I saw my dad standing there. Almost immediately I felt a feeling of relief washing over me. Of course it was just my dad. Looking back at it, it seemed stupid to think anyone else was in the house. He pushed things in the fridge aside as if you were looking for something,

and he took out a package of half-empty raw bacon. I watched him for a moment as he turned it over in his hands before sliding his fingers into the plastic and pulling out the slimy, limp strips of meat and fat, without even stopping to think about it. He stuffed the bacon into his mouth, chewing it loudly.

I watched him in quiet disbelief. Was he seriously eating raw bacon out of the package? That was disgusting. The sounds you made turned my stomach a little bit, too. wet, smacking, and chewing noises that I'd never heard anyone else make while they ate before. He greedily reached back into the package and crammed another handful of raw bacon into his mouth, still loudly chewing as he stared into the fridge for more. He didn't seem to see anything.

Instead, he just clutched the package and closed the fridge door before wandering over to the other side of the kitchen in the dark. That was when I noticed that the trap door, leading into the basement was open. I watched as my dad shambled towards it. He crammed the last of the bacon into his mouth before he began to descend, still holding the empty package. A hand reached up to pull the trapdoor closed behind him. But I could still hear the shuffling footsteps beneath me.

I could hear my dad walking deeper into the basement. And I heard the sound of something else. being pulled close with a heavy thought. My heart was racing as I retreated back up the stairs, and as I did, I could hear my parents snoring in their bedroom. No, not my parents. My dad, he was the only one who snored. Mom was quiet when she slept.

Dad snoring had always been loud. You could always tell when he was asleep because it sounded like someone was mowing their lawn. I don't know how mom ever put up with it. I could hear the snoring. My dad was asleep in his bedroom. He'd been asleep the whole time. And if he'd been asleep the whole time, who was that I'd just seen returning to the basement? I didn't sleep that night.

I couldn't. I just crawl back into bed and I lay away, listening to every groan that old house made. I'd stayed in touch with a few friends of mine from before the move. We mostly talked over phone calls, but during the weekends my parents were okay if I did sleepovers at their place. I started doing a lot more of those sleepovers after I saw that thing that looked like my dad were turning to the basement. I never told my friends what I'd seen. I never told my family either. I just wanted to be out of that house.

The nights where I had to stay there were sleepless. I heard every groan of the house, every scratch inside the walls, every footstep from downstairs. I heard them clearly. I don't know how my parents didn't. Maybe they just hand-waved them like I'd been doing. After all, we were supposedly the only ones in the house, right? Maybe staying silent was a mistake. I was so afraid that nobody would believe me

that I thought the best thing to do was to say nothing at all. Looking back at it, I should have done things differently. God, I wish I'd done things differently. It was almost a month after I saw the figure who looked like my dad that I got a call for my family while I was staying over to a friend's house. One moment my friend and I were playing video games. games and the next, his mom was standing at the door looking concerned and holding the phone. Alan, your parents are calling, she said.

There was obvious worry in her voice and it struck a nerve in me. I remember taking the phone from her and pressing it to my ear. Hello? Hello, Alan. A voice replied. It was a voice I recognized. It sounded like my mother's voice. It sounded like it, but I knew the moment it said my name, that it was not my mother speaking.

I'm afraid there's a bit of an emergency. I'm sorry, but we need you to come home right away. Something about the voice sent a chill through me. Something about it sounded so wrong. I gripped the phone tight, almost tight enough to my knuckles turned white. Yeah, sure thing. I said. Then I hung up.

She was just checking in on me. I told my friend's mom and I remember putting on a fake smile. I don't think she bought it for a second. What was the best I could manage and she didn't press the issue. That night I left my friend's house alone. I didn't tell them where I was going. I don't even think I knew where I was going. I've never looked back.

I've had a hard life since then. I've slept on park benches, been forced to rely on the charity of others. I've been robbed, beaten, and hungry for days on end. But I've managed to survive and put as much distance between myself and Falkland as I can. I've made a decent life for myself. I don't stay in one place for long, but despite that, I've saved up in my own. enough money to take care of myself. I even managed to buy a cheap car that gets me from place to place.

It's not a glamorous existence, but I make do. I looked myself up a few years ago. According to Facebook, Alan Shaw is a college graduate. He works a tech job in Burlington, Ontario. He's got a dog and a girlfriend. He looks just like me. more or less, or looks like what I might have looked like if I'd had his life. But I know the truth about him.

I know what he isn't. I've looked at the faces of his mother and father, faces that look like my own family and the ways that matter. But I can still see the difference. It's in the eyes, mostly. Once or twice I fantasized about buying a... gun, hunting them down and destroying them. But I could never bring myself to do it.

I don't really think I have the stomach for that kind of thing. Assuming I could even kill them, it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't give me much closure. I'd just either kill some things that look like me and people I used to love or die in the process. Although, after, I have to be able to. reading something in the news the other day. I might just change my mind. You see a house in Falkland burned down a couple months ago. They say it was an electrical fire. Nobody was killed. But they found

human remains in the basement, around 15 corpses. Fifteen, my fucking mind. But you want to know what the real kicker is. You want to know the weird part. They tried to ID those corpses. And when they did, they found that most of them belonged to people who were apparently still alive. It got chalked up to a mistake. Contaminated equipment or something. I didn't see that much about it on the news, but it got my attention. Fifteen corpses. Fifteen replacements. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe more. I don't know how long it's been going on. Maybe it's better that I don't ever know. But something tells me that what happened at the Falkland House isn't really the end of it. It's not just me this thing is affected. Maybe I'm the only one who knows about it.

But it's happened to others before. Something tells me that it's going to happen again. I don't know what's worse anymore. hunting down and killing the things that look like my family and me are leaving them be, letting them keep doing what they've been doing. Either way, I'm going to have to live with something horrible. That's just the fact of the matter,

but maybe it won't be so bad if the thing I'll have to live with is worth it. Maybe. 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 story's author.