Creepy - Numbers of the Ghoul

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Numbers of the Ghoul (starts at 3:16)***Written by: Adella E Herron and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***Content warning: abuse, decomposing animal***On the Road with Mrs. Tipps (starts at 36:48)***Written by: Fernando Sanchez and Narrated by: Rissa Montanez***Content warning: verbal/emotional abuse***Sealed in the Mines (starts at 59:22)***Written by: Ryan Hanson***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Hey, everyone.

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Kayla McDaniels, They Love Them, Travis Simonis, Justin Wood, Georgia Mayfield, Dan, The Mage Tank, Cthula Rose, and Ned. All patrons get a shout out and early commercial free access to all episodes.

Other Patreon tiers include weekly bonus episodes and logo merch. To see how you can support the show and get rewarded, please check out the donation tiers of patreon.com slash creepypod. And before we get to the show, I wanted to shout out a new movie about to come out from director Adam Wingard, who you might remember from the Phase 1 clinical trial segment in VHS2, as well as directing the guest, death note,

Godzilla versus Kong, and the phenomenal year next. His new movie On Slot isn't exactly horror, but if you were a fan of movies like Planet Terror, I think you're going to enjoy this as much as I did. I got a chance to watch an early screener of it, which I don't get to do very much. So I really wasn't sure what to expect, and what I got was what I'd call,

we'll call updated grindhouse. It was big and bloody and insane in ways that I wasn't expecting at all, And I guess it's also been confirmed to take place in the same universe as its previous movie The Guest. Another movie I definitely recommend you check out. It'll be in theater September 4th and features horror favorites Rebecca Hall, Michael Bain, and for MMA fans, Alex Pereira. I like to think at this point you've all come to know that I don't recommend you listen to or watch anything that I don't really enjoy. And this one, I'll admit, surprised me.

It started out bizarre, and it just kept getting better from that. there. It's not exactly horror, but it'll fill your blood quota. Honestly, one of the most fun movie watches I've had in a while. That's Onslaught in theaters, September 4th. Okay, thank you for listening to that. Now let's get into the stories this week. First up, an urban explorer live streams an investigation of an abandoned mathematician's house, only to discover the strange experiments conducted there are far more horrifying and real than they imagined. From writer Adela E. Heron and narrated by Heather Thomas. Creepy Presents, Numbers of the ghoul.

Hey, what's up, all you undead herb-exers? It's your favorite ghoul coming at you live from the Hollows Eve YouTube channel. That's how it all started. That's how all my live stream started. It was like my trademark, you know. Kind of typical, I guess. I'd introduce myself to the audience. in the phone camera's eye, and talk about some abandoned place I had just discovered off an obscure internet forum. That was my schick, see. I was an urban explorer.

Tracing out the floor plans of an abandoned mall and eating decade-old candy off the shelf of a boarded-up supermarket was my thing. I mean, I was urban exploring before urban exploring even had a name. I started creeping around old and forlorn places in high school, I suppose, as a way to get away from it all. You know how chaotic high school gets when kids are morphing into adults. Some fight against this change. Others embrace it,

and the lucky ones are able to ignore it. I was one of those kids who tried to ignore it, and the only way I could do this was to get away, to be in places where there were no condescending adults or angsty teens. Places where people, and all their troubles and struggles, were nothing more than water stains in the walls of a collapsing church. Of course I got older, and unlike my love for urban exploration,

the pressure of growing up came and went like the blink of an eye. And by that time I had gotten a car and was exploring abandoned places hundreds of miles away. One of my friends suggested I start recording my adventures and upload them to the internet. So that's what I started doing around 2016. After a few years, I accumulated two years. just enough viewers to start hosting live streams of my urban explorations. My live streams did moderately well, but there was one stream that really got my channel buzzing. Streamed on a late October night, I explored the decaying hospital that was located just outside

my city. One of the reasons the video blew up was because of the seriously creepy EVPs I had caught. A ghost by the name of Sebastian introduced himself from the shadows of a moldy waiting room. In the recording I had of him, he rasps in a dreamy, tired voice. Are you a doctor? A few seconds later, he says the two words, Constant headaches. After the ghost introduced himself, I went down to the musty and damp records room and rummage through the files.

There, as you probably might have already guessed, I stumbled upon the file of one Sebastian Tolliver, who died from a botched lobotomy in the 50. What was just going to be a harmless exploration of an abandoned hospital turned into a rather eventful ghost hunt that set my viewer count rising faster than a zombie from the dead. And if the EVPs weren't enough, the shadows along the hospital walls pulsed in the light of my phone's camera like shadow puppets playing out days long since past. Days when the hospital was brightly lit, clean, and bustling with doctors, nurses, patients,

friends and family members. You could almost feel the life of that past. The hopes, the struggles, the tragedies, and the moments of joy of all the people who ever walked, stomped, or ran down those sterile hallways. It almost makes you want to cry. A lot of my viewers found all the abnormal shadows and EVPs to be thrilling. And, hey, I was happy to give them some harmless horror that they could sink their teeth into. I myself felt like a wind-up toy. I simply couldn't wait to throw myself into the next ghostly escapade.

In all my years of urban exploration, I had never encountered ghosts, and therefore never really gave them much thought. But after that, October night, it was like a switch went off. I became a believer in the paranormal, and I was hungry for more. After many hours of rummaging through the online databases of various historical societies and chatting with social media groups of like-minded urban explorers, I stumbled upon one place that seemed to hit all the beats. Situated in the northeastern corner of the state, the DeMorgan House had been built in the late 1970s.

With its sweet gingerbread trimming, spacious wraparound porch, and tall church-like windows, the last thing you would have guessed was that the man who had the house built, Silas de Morgan, possessed some dark and cryptic secret. From what little I could find on him, he was a reclusive and eccentric mathematician who rarely ventured from his house in the mountains. When he did venture out, he rarely spoke to anyone, keeping to himself as he ran his errands. After his strange and sudden disappearance in 1984, some university math professors from the state college came out and reported that they had been contacted by Silas the year before he disappeared.

He wrote to them, telling them about how he had written some mathematical proofs that gave him eternal life. They brushed him off as a kook and ignored his letters demanding they collaborate with him to conjure up more powerful proofs, one which could open gates into other dimensions, or something like that. Look, like those university professors, I didn't know what any of that meant. All I knew was that after Silas disappeared, a description of him had been released in the local papers. He was described as a tall, frail man. Despite being in his mid-30s, he had long white hair. And if his white hair didn't immediately identify him, the scars on his neck and hands certainly would.

Shortly after he had moved into his house, he had carved numbers and mathematical symbols into his skin with a fine blade. It was these numbers and symbols that scabbed and scarred across his body. Great? I thought after a few hours' worth of research at my desktop, an old isolated house that was once the home of a psychotic mathematician. Upon retrospect, I can't help but find it kind of funny that after the hospital video, I became a believer in spirits. And, well, after the DeMorgan House, I became a... believer in witchcraft. The northeastern part of the state is marked by wide, rolling hills that gradually grow into the mountains of a sprawling forest. Two hours after I'd left the city, I was driving through thick woodlands with the pale blue haze of colossal summits in the distance.

They rose into the cold, cloudless sky far beyond the end of the road. I remember throwing thankful glances at my gas meter because I had filled up before the trip. Getting stuck out, there literally meant getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere. And though there were no notable towns as I was closing in on the De Morgan House, the elusive lone cabins behind curtains of American Beach told me that there were people. There were always people. When I thought I'd seen the last cabin off on a hill or in a glen, another abode would pop up from behind the thick bushes. By the time I was finally on the rocky winding path that led to the De Morgan House, it was 5.30 p.m. though in mid-November, 5.30 in the afternoon felt more like 10 at night.

Because it was so dark, the dirty side of the house materialized in my headlights with phantom-like spontaneity. I would have pulled up a little closer to it at this point, but between my car and the house, a dead tree was lying on its side. I can't explain the rush of excitement. and adrenaline I felt as I parked my car, turned on my headlamp, zipped up my parka, and started up my live stream. All right, guys, I spoke to my reflection in the phone. I'm finally here. It's almost 6 p.m. Um, I'm going to wait in the car for a little bit, because it's absolutely freezing out there, but we'll head out in a few minutes.

The viewer count at around 605 was, to my surprise, a little over a thousand people. Let's hope for a good episode, I thought, as I pulled myself out of the car and tasted the pines of the distant, unseen mountains on my tongue. I swung my legs over the fallen tree, then trudged towards the house. Once a pristine white, the house's paneling was a crusty gray, with dark splotches where moss had grown in the summer, before it shriveled in. and died. Let's check around the back, I told the chat between shallow, puffing breaths. Behind the house, my headlamp swam briskly over the thin, ash-colored veins of a dead Virginia creeper. In past summers, a creeper had drawn a chaotic roadmap across the back of the house with its web of sticky vines, but now it was nothing more than a leafless, bloodless

circulatory system. A dead parasite that clung to its dead host. There's no glass and most of the windows. I switched from the front camera to the rear camera and pointed up at the house. After I made my way to the other side of the house where the rusted artery of a chimney stood, I rounded the corner and was back in the overgrown front yard. So, guys, this is the house. I said with the fingers of my free hand spread out like I was reassuring my audience of something. This is the house that Silas de Morgan, that crazy mathematician, built and hid himself away in. My nose was red from the cold, and behind me in the camera,

there was nothing but a couple of post-like trees against a sheet of black night. The moment I stepped on to the wraparound porch, the weight of my heavy boots made the bleached planks squeal and depress. The living room windows by the front door, like the windows in the back, had no glass, though they had been boarded up. Across the porch, shards of beer bottles, food wrappers, and cigarette butts formed a junky carpet that made me glad I had decided to wear my heavy-duty boots. All right, chat.

I started towards the front door. The moment we've all been waiting for. One hand holding onto the door frame, and the other holding my phone up with its flashlight turned on, I leaned into the house and scanned a darkness that glittered with silvery dust. The front door, though hanging to the wall, by one set of hinges, had been propped up against a massive piece of furniture. A heavy oak shift robe on its side, I'd soon realize. After a few long seconds of struggling through the slit between the door and the threshold,

I was finally in. I was in the De Morgan House. Here we are at last, baby bats. Look at this place. Wow. Looking through my camera, I saw that to my left was the living room, to my right, the kitchen, and straight ahead, a hallway leading past a staircase. I asked my audience which room I should explore first.

In the moments leading up to a general consensus, I leaned forward. Looking down into the kitchen, I felt like I was looking into a wide, toothless mouth with trash for a tongue and loose wires for teeth. Some of the cabinets above the space where the stove would be hung open and were empty. And that's when it hit me. Beneath the crisp autumn aroma of the pines, beneath the cold and clean scent of encroaching winter, there was the faint smell of ammonia,

a gentle sourness subdued by low temperatures. Somewhere beneath all that crumpled up newspaper, empty two liters, and faded blankets, was the decomposing body of an animal. Upon this realization, the hairs on my arms prickled instinctually. But, you know, this wouldn't be the first time. Things like dead animals come with the urban exploration territory.

Okay, guys, my words were quick and peppy. What's the consensus? Living room it is, then. The musty living space was a lot smaller on the inside. The ceiling in the middle had collapsed and formed a chalky, splintery pile of wood and wallpaper. On one side of the rubble, a small sapling no taller than me, had miraculously sprouted and was hibernating. As I rounded the pile, I focused my phone's camera on the sapling.

Against the walls across the room, the spidery shadows of the branches grew and shrunk in silence. Then I pointed my phone's camera into the jagged hole in the ceiling. It was a bedroom, and I could see some of the floral wallpaper stained with bruise-like discoloration, peeling away near the ceiling. Now, at the far end of the room, I crawled over a bookcase that took up much of the floor space. As I pulled myself up next to the fireplace mantle, every sound seemed to be whispering loudly.

The plastic rumpling of my gloved free hand clutching the edge of the bookcase, my boots thudding into the hollow floor when I made it over. The huffs of my breath, the small filler words I'd muttered to myself. For a few moments, I let my arms. audience soak in the living room from the angle that captured the pile of ceiling and its sapling, the shift robe by the front door, and the mouth of the kitchen across the hall. And that's when someone in my live feed said they saw something. I didn't think anything of it at first, but then other people were writing things like, you saw that too? I thought that was just a shadow. Shadow with eyes? What, guys, you saw something?

The quiver that shook my voice was the result of thrill and terror, mixing like a Halloween cocktail inside my chest. What did you guys see? Someone's upstairs, one viewer wrote. Come on, guys. Did you really see something? I looked up back through the hole in the ceiling, into an eyeless socket of mold and must and ripped wallpaper. When you were by the fireplace, another wrote, There were two glowing eyes looking down at you from the ceiling. Uh-huh.

The cycle of my eyes bouncing between phone and ceiling was broken by a light scratching, like raccoon claws, a brief scuttling somewhere on the second story in the direction of the hall outside the kitchen. How come you didn't see it? It was so obvious. Its teeth gleaned in your phone's light, another said. Maybe this is all staged?

wrote a user by the name of tin foil hat Taco 69. Guys, guys! The thrill and terror wasn't completely gone from my voice, but the deep breaths of cold air, of pine scent over a touch of ammonia, had induced an evened alertness. I hadn't even been in the house for longer than 15 minutes, and things were already getting good. It's probably a raccoon or something, I shrugged.

wide-eyed. Now at the foot of the stairs in the hall, my headlamp filled the staircase with bone-colored light. The earthy smell of old books and of closets never opened was so thick I could taste its tang in the back of my nose. I gazed hard past the top of the stairs, gazed hard into the shadows, like there were my own reflection in a mirror. One second, two seconds, three seconds passed. A diminution squeak of wood from upstairs, directly above me, yanked my gaze up to the ceiling. I waited a second longer, reveling in the suspense. Okay, let's settle this. I said more to myself than to my viewers as I began to climb the stairs. Looking through my camera as I went, I called out, Hello? Anyone up here? Then to the chat.

You guys remember the squatters in the supermarket? Yeah, that chased us out. This house is so far out in the middle of nowhere that I find it hard to believe that anyone would be living here, at the top of the stairs now. Before me, a narrow passage stretched down about 20 feet and ended with a shut door. Apparently a graffiti artist had come up here

and painted the walls in fat, colorful letters, and psychedelic imagery. rainbow hearts, marijuana leaves, cartoon eyes, and cartoon grins. Of course, the obligatory dick drawing that comes with every abandoned place had been painted a neon pink on the door at the end of the hall. There are a total of five doors up there, two along each wall, and the fifth at the end of the hall. All closed.

I called out one more time as I directed my attention to the first door to my left, the door that led to the room whose floor caved in over the living space. Grabbing the wiggly doorknob, the hinges made a high-pitched trilling sound similar to that of a screech-owls. It was the little laughter that preceded an unanticipated sense of implosion. Two steps in, the smallness of the bedroom, and the way the ceiling seemed to bow above me, overwhelmed me with the feeling that the space was closing in on itself, like everything was on the verge of prumbling inward, to be sucked through the black hole in the floor.

But there was something else, something else that made my skin crawl. Was it the wallpaper, livid like a corpse's skin, and the way it peeled as if the house was decomposing like a person? Or maybe it was the perfectly square window across the room, which, even when my light swept over it, remained as black as deep space? Or maybe it was the,

the sense that I could feel the memories in this room. Feel them like how you feel the air of someone very close to you, barely touching you. Memories of what, though? Memories of what? Whatever these memories were that had spilled invisibly from the sores in the walls, had taken hold of my throat, and squeezed till I couldn't breathe. Squeezed till my lips quivered uncontrollably, and the tears began to burn. in my eyes.

Look, guys. A nervous chuckle broken by a suppressed cough and a gasper air. A quick sweep of my camera and light through the decaying room. Nothing in here but a big safety hazard. Let's check another room. It was hard to shake off that feeling of suffocation, but I tried my best to act like nothing had happened. I asked the chat which room I should go into next,

and pretty quickly, Most people place their votes on the door at the end of the hall. As it turned out, the door at the end of the hall opened to a narrow flight of stairs that spiraled upward and opened through the floor of an attic. Halfway up the stairs, the starchy smell of chalk whirled around me and brought back memories of old classrooms. Whoa, guys! At the top of the stairs, I pulled myself out of the hole in the floor and shook the cobwebs out of my hair. It's so cramped with stuff. Bookcases showing faded bookspines lined both sides of the small rectangular space.

To my immediate left, in front of one of the bookcases, was a rolling chalkboard smeared with dust and chalk. There was writing on it. Just numbers and equations and symbols I couldn't understand. Like upside-down A's and backwards E's, and S's stretched like they were on the verge of being ripped in two. The spines of most of the books were so old that I could barely make out the titles. Of the titles I could read, there was one in particular that snagged my attention.

I brought it over to the small writing desk that stood beneath a church-like window opposite of the stairs. Phone's camera pointing downward to the red front cover, I ran my index finger beneath the title and author name. The Body Hemoptopy by Silas A. de Morgan. Opening the book, I read the first paragraph of the preface. Geometric objects, like a cube in a sphere, are the same in the eyes of a mathematician, for one can change a cube into a sphere and a sphere into a cube by defining nothing more than a certain function from one to the other. In this book, I provide the theorems which, when carved into the skin of a human being with a heated blade, can change the shape of that body into something terrifically grotesque.

My lips pursed then. Silence filled the room. The chalk in the air twinkled in the light between my headlamp and the open book. I watched one particular speck spiral downward towards the glowing pages and drift into nothing. Damn, I said at last. That's kind of cool. I don't know, guys, but I kind of want to. want to take this book, you know?

Silence. One second. Two seconds. My eyes ran down the aisle of Silas' words while my viewers were all responding in voiceless messages and emojis. Still, the silence did not cease. Instead, it took shape and twisted all around me. Then my head drew up, and I was face to face with the glass beneath the window's latticework.

My reflection drowned out by my headlamp. there was something off in this silence, something new that brought out an animal's alertness in me. And that's when I realized, that's when I realized just how vulnerable I was, how vulnerable I had been this whole time. The moment I stepped out of my car into the freezing dark night, anything could have been watching and listening to me from beyond the post like trees. The chat had provided a false sense of sense of. security, a false sense that I was in the company of other people, when in reality, I had been effectively talking to ghosts. Then I smelled it. Ammonia. Decay. It was a sickly, sallowish smell that threw across my mind a memory that still rings my stomach to this day. The memory of a dead

deer in its deepest stages of decomposition. Yellow and white guts turned out to the world, found in a apartment complex when I was barely a teenager. The animal alertness turned into fear. Holy shit! It was all I could squeak out after the air in my lungs drained in one deep exhale, and I stopped breathing. I didn't need to turn around immediately to know I was no longer alone. I could feel that I was not alone.

I could feel their air and smell their death. Then I hurt them. Their precise footsteps shuffling through the loose paper on the floor. And with each footstep taken closer towards me, fireworks went off at the end of every nerve in my body. A thousand stabbing, electrifying pinpricks. My fighter flight response pumped gallons of panic into my heart, and the muscles in my chest still refused to take an inhale.

My phone fell with a thud out of my shaking hands. Eyes clenched shut. I felt my burning palms press against my ears. A hissing voice demanded again. For a split second, I wasn't sure if the voice was coming from out of the depths of my own waves of fear. Wasn't my inner self that was speaking to me? And demanding that I opened my eyes and face whatever it was that was behind me? But the voice rasped again.

And then I knew that the words were real. The icy breath like the tip of a corpse's finger drew a line down the back of my neck. I couldn't look. Not in a million years. Not in that moment. My body decided it wasn't going to wait for my brain to make up its mind. One second the icy breath was brushing against the back of my neck, and the next second I was falling down the spiral stairs.

I can't recall anything that happened in between those two points of time. I must have barreled my way past whatever it was that was behind me, but in the end, it mattered little. How it mattered little. After I pulled myself up at the base of the attic stairs, I ran, almost on all fours, down to the first floor, and threw myself against the front door. In my panic, I pulled out the door to widen it, but the oak shift robe was in the way. It was in the way, and it wasn't budging. straining and cursing and crying at the damned piece of furniture,

I then tried to force my way back through the slit between the door and threshold, like I had done earlier. But it was tight. Earlier I was able to suck in my stomach, and that helped me a little to wiggle through. But now, my heavy breathing and clumsy motions simply made something that was already hard to do, now impossible. I stepped back, throwing off my thick parka,

before I made the mistake of looking over my shoulder towards the stairs. All I could do was smother a scream with my sweaty hands. Slumping to the ground, I watched in horror as it, a ghoul, looked down at me from the top of the stairs. In the bone-colored light of my headlamp, a skeleton's grin had been cleanly carved into his emaciated face. In spite of the slight hunch that had drawn his shoulders forward and curved his spine, He was a tall creature.

His impressive height seemed to lengthen the shadows that framed him. As he started to descend the stairs, to approach me, his ivory bones and vampiric teeth, teeth meant for drawing blood, clicked like rocks on a mountain path. Vague shadows of humanity pulled in the deep sockets of his white glowing eyes. He looked more like a deep sea creature with how translucent and gray his skin was. Halfway down the stairs, I could see the thick blue tubes of his veins run down his legs and knot over his joints and spread like a glass roadmap over his concave stomach. His stomach, upon his stomach was a scar, a sideways eight, infinity.

And in one skeleton hand was a slender knife, a ritualistic looking weapon. The red, almost black handle, has to be it. the smoothness and shine of a mahogany chess piece. But the blade, the blade was a burning hot orange. What the fuck are you? My words blended into one long, high-pitched scream that swelled throughout the house. Suddenly a weight pressed down into my legs when I tried to pull myself up. At first I thought my fear had paralyzed me, but the weight became heavier and heavier,

as if slabs of rock were being heaved onto them. Within moments, the invisible weight sent excruciating pain bursting through my lower body. My leg bones felt like they were about to splinter. Beneath my cries of pain, I heard a snap in my right knee, and searing agony tore through that leg. There was no running from this, with unuttered spells. The ghost was seeing to that. Finally, when the blur from the pain subsided from my vision, and I could see past the cloud of tears, I looked up to see.

see the ghoul standing over me. My gaze had been immediately sucked into the white orbs of his eyes. Eyes like those of the dreadful telescope vision. Then the creature bent down and stood on his knees. Paralyzed, I could do nothing, not even scream, when his cold fingers curled around my wrist. He straightened my ragdoll arm and ran the tip of the blade down the sleeve,

ripping the fabric cleanly past the cuff. When the torn sleeve parted, the skin of my forearm revealed, the creature started to cut symbols into my flesh. Upside down A's, backwards ease. Messes stretched beyond their limits. No blood ran from the hot symbols. Only a burrowing sting. I watched in horror as mathematical ruins beyond my understanding were being cut into my arm. Remembering what I had read from the body haematopoe, I was convinced.

that it was only a matter of time, before my body was to contort into some hellish shape, and that I would become some geometric blasphemy of blood and bone. But of course, that's not what happened. I'm here speaking to you, aren't I? Silas de Morgan, see, had other plans for me. These scars on my arm have instilled in me a purpose that I cannot deny nor ignore. A thrall's purpose, yes, but a purpose nonetheless. The master cannot always waste his power on capturing little worms like you.

He must save his strength for the higher mathematical spells, the ones that open the fractal gates. You know, you remind me of myself. You came to the DeMorgan House, thinking you'd find some cheap thrills that you could post about on social media. but you didn't think you'd find yourself tied up like this squirming on the kitchen floor. Don't you worry. Once Silas finishes writing his proof that, when etched into your skin, will open a fractal gate. We'll go upstairs.

Up the spiral staircase. A caregiver fleeing a mysterious catastrophe with her elderly charge and a stolen fortune must endure an increasingly brutal journey down an empty road while something were less. endlessly follows them. From writer Fernando Sanchez and narrated by Ursa Montanez. Cribee presents. On the road with Mrs. Tips. When the car sputtered to a halt in the middle of nowhere,

Glenda knew they were in deep trouble. The car's low fuel indicator had lit up about 50 miles earlier. Refuel soon, the display read, and had been flashing an angry and urgent red final warning as the Ford's engine slowly but surely starved of petrol. Glinda had stayed inside the dead car for a few minutes, considering her options, until the blazing midday sun had made the heat inside the cabin unbearable, which didn't take long. The second-hand Ford's Aircon had not worked for years, so she had gotten out, taken the wheelchair and the thick tape-wrapped brown envelope out of the trunk, unfolded the chair with a curse, and struggled to get Mrs. Tips out of the back seat and onto the chair. She tucked the bulky envelope in the little compartment under the chair's seat and began pushing, already sweating profusely.

She didn't see the first one for about a mile and a half. The heat shimmer made it difficult to judge distance accurately, but she thought it was far enough that it wouldn't see them. Glenda kept pushing all the same, occasionally glancing over her shoulder. Where are we going? Mrs. Tip said in her trademark croaking voice. We're just taking a daytime walk, Mrs. Tips. I don't like it here. It's hot. We'll be back at the house soon. Glenda wiped the sweat dripping over her eyes and scanned her surroundings.

The road stretched for miles. She hadn't seen any sign for the closest service station, which meant that the next rest stop, if there were any, was probably too far away anyway. A motel, maybe? There were plenty of cheap motels on a house. most roads out of the city, so she'd hope they get lucky. But again, she hadn't seen any sign for nearby motels or diners. In other words, no shelter. She briefly considered doubling back

to the Ford, but that'd be no good. Too hot and no water. Besides, they could run into some of those things. The car was likely to attract attention. She did not even want to consider the possibility that there could be some ahead of them too. For now, there was just road, so Glenda kept pushing. The broadcaster's message had been unequivocal. Get out of the city while you still can. Was the gist of it, spoken in that monotone matter-of-factly radio host manner? The emergency broadcast had come in at exactly 8.27 a.m. that morning.

Glenda had woken Mrs. Tips, who fought her off because it wasn't her usual get-up time, bundled her into the car still in her night clothes, shove the wheelchair and the envelope into the trunk, and drove away. She didn't even have time to get a change of clothes for herself. She had attempted to get petrol, but the gas nozzles in the only station on her side of the city were lying on the ground,

and the place appeared to have been ransacked. She did try the nozzles, but they were dry, and drove on in a hurry after hearing strange sounds inside the station. I need to use the facilities. If there was something she hated about the silly old woman, it was the stupid euphemisms for going to the toilet. Try to hold it a bit longer, Mrs. Tips. How much longer?

I don't know. I really need to go. Just hold it, Mrs. Tips, please. Glenda thought of letting her go at the side of the road, but A, it was too fucking hot to take an eye. octogenarian with lame legs out of a wheelchair and awkwardly hold her while she did her business, and then lift her back into the chair. Glenda thought she would actually melt away because she was already sweating so much.

And B, she intended to hold on to whatever thin thread of dignity she still had, even as the world went to hell. For the time being, there was just herself, Mrs. Tips, a squeaking and increasingly hot wheelchair, and a seemingly endless open road. So Glenda kept pushing. The second one, she spotted about a couple of hours later. While it was walking away from the road, Glenda thought it was close enough so it could see them

if it just happened to turn its head at the right moment. Worse still, it might be able to hear them in the relative stillness of the hot afternoon. Too close for comfort, she thought, looking around for anywhere she could hide. There was some tall shrubbery off the road to her left, but that would mean driving the chair over uneven ground there and back, a chance she wasn't sure she was willing to take.

The effort itself would drain her quickly dwindling energy, and the chair might just make enough noise to draw attention. Glenda kept walking forward, her gaze fixated on the thing walking to her right. I need the lavatory. Quiet, Glenda said, and looked over to the side of the road.

Where are we? I want to go home. Keep quiet, Mrs. Tips, please. Her heart now racing. Glenda squinted. The heat haze hampered her vision, but she thought that the thing on the other side of the road was no longer moving.

If it had heard them, things could go very wrong, very quickly. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. In a panic, Glenda pushed the chair off the road towards the bushes. The chair clattered and clanged and squeaked as it moved over rough terrain, and Mrs. Tips almost fell off twice. She held on to the chair's handles and shouted obscenities, which Glenda ignored. She also ignored the sweating and the insipid soreness in her forearms

as she pushed the chair behind the tall shrubbery. You stupid bitch, you silly cow, I almost fell. Mrs. Tips, shut up, please! Her heart raced, and she took shallow, laborous breaths. The hot air burned her lungs. Her face felt uncomfortably warm, and the top of her head was on fire. Sunstroke wasn't far off, Glenda thought. Bitch.

Bitch! The unbearable heat. And the mummifying witch's shrill, croaking voice, almost pushed Glenda over the edge. She had a sudden urge to grab a rock and smash it over Mrs. Tip's balding head. But she didn't. She was a thief, not a murderer. At least, not yet. The day was relatively young.

A rather opportune, or inopportune depending on the point of view, on Mrs. Tip's part, gave Glenda a chance to look over the bushes. standing on her toes she could just see over the dry stalks. The haze of heat surrounding them played tricks with her sight, but she thought the thing had reversed course and was now walking towards the road. From where it was, it could not see them yet, but the bushes would not conceal them for long, and there was always the possibility that the old hag would begin calling at any moment, giving away their position.

Glenda judged that she still had a good head start as to keep her distance, if they were spotted, so she did the only thing she could do. She pushed the chair back onto the road with great effort, once again, almost causing the old woman to fall off and kept moving on. By early evening, there were five of them walking behind, far enough that the heat of the road made them look like ghostly mirages, but there were definitely five. So she kept pushing. By nightfall, her legs felt like jello. Her forearm screened blue murder, and her fists, which she could barely feel, might as well have become fused with the chair's push handles. She had trouble breathing.

Every gulp of air felt like a hot ember in her throat. She was thirsty, hungry, and badly had to use the facilities herself. Only there were no facilities, just open road. She considered just pissing herself as she walked, much like the old crone had done about three hours earlier. And Glenda suspected she had done a number two, also, if the stink was anything to go by. This was turning out to be one hell of a day. The last time she had looked back, she had counted 15 of them, about half a mile behind. So Glenda did the only thing she could do.

She pushed on. And at least, she still had the fat envelope, which, she had enough presence of mind to move out of Mrs. Tips' piss stream at just the right moment. When Glenda Thorne had first taken up employment as home carer for Rose Marion Tips, she had no intention of ripping the old woman off. In fact, Glenda had been on the straight and narrow for about a year and a half by then. She considered herself lucky to have found that job after serving seven months out of a 16-month sentence for larceny in the county jail. Thank God for small favors that an old associate who happened to be.

to be working at the temping office, had fudged her background check. And she kind of did like Mrs. Tips at the start. She could be annoying and cantankerous, yes. But when you reach her age, you get a pass for being a nagging bitch, Glenda thought. And she could be funny, too. Glenda enjoyed listening to Mrs. Tip's stories about how she and her husband Lionel, my little lion, she called him. Love to play bingo together and how they'd be able to.

made love while holidaying in Europe. But that had been before the stroke that rendered Mrs. Tip's legs useless and caused incontinence and cognitive issues. And her personality changed too. The woman had always had a tendency to criticize and offer unwanted opinions. But after the stroke, her mouth turned into a relentless, nagging engine. Why was there only one biscuit on the saucer today, Glenda? You know I usually take two on Tuesdays. These slippers are. are filthy, my dear. Oh, your hair looks like a disheveled Alley Cat's fur. My bed isn't warm enough.

Other times, she would take issue with her hair. Color, length, style, or shape, depending on the day. Choice of footwear, color coordination, or lack thereof, of her work outfits, and every other topic she could think of something to torment her about. And Glenda wasn't the only target of Mrs. Tip's sharp tongue. Oh, no. her former husband featured heavily in her daily rants as well. My little lion became that low-life-cheating bastard,

that greedy, sniveling, small dick conniving son of a bitch always sucking on the tits of Doris Mercer, that rancid bitch who called the balls at the bingo hole. I wonder what she called his balls. They were almost invisible. A good-for-nothing scumbag, Lender. That's what he was. Whether any of that was true or mere figments of the old woman's addled mind post-stroke,

Glenda couldn't tell, and frankly, she did not care. But as it turned out, the little lion was good at one thing, at least. For what Glenda had been able to glean, Lionel Tips, a name that amused Glenda to no end, had worked as an insurance executive all his life, and astute savor as he was, had squirled away a small fortune. When he passed unexpectedly, the circumstances of which had never been clear,

but Mrs. Tips always winked at her when the conversation came up. The money had come under the control of Mr. Tips' widow, who stowed it in cash in the house. Glenda had fought temptation for a long time. She really did, but under constant bombardment from the old woman's nagging, plus a couple of bad bets, she had fallen off the wagon. With really bad timing, as it turned out, as things went bad in the city.

And in many other places, according to the news, before she figured out what to do with the loot. At sunrise, she counted no fewer than 50 walking about three quarters of a mile behind. Maybe more. Glenda could no longer see, count, or think straight. The soles of her sneakers had partially melted in the hot asphalt the day before.

Her clothes were drenched in sweat. She could no longer feel her hands. and while the night had brought in some welcome respite from the heat, her face felt hot and puffy. Her lips were as dry as kindling and broken in multiple places. She had pissed herself at some point during the night, but she neither realized nor cared. Her breathing sounded like a tire deflating,

and the sun hadn't even come up yet. Still, she pushed on. For what else could she do? She looked at Mrs. Tips, whose body rested askew on the chair. The old woman's head low left and right and sink with the chair's rattle. The stench rising from the chair was nauseating. Glenda thought she was probably dead.

Thank God for small miracles, she thought. With a monumental effort, she looked back over her shoulder. She must have been walking really slowly without realizing it, because they seemed to have closed some distance. 600 yards, give or take. In the stillness of the pre-dawn, she could hear them. The shuffling walk, the weird vocalizations, the strange way their heads moved from side to side, and their relentless push forward.

Mrs. Tips suddenly coughed. I need water, Glenda. The old woman said in a weak, hoarse voice. Glenda said nothing, just kept pushing the squeaky chair. Mrs. Tips coughed again, and the sun's crown rose over the horizon. Glenda, please, I need water. Glenda ignored her again. And give me back my money.

That Glenda did not ignore. She stopped so suddenly that Mrs. Tips almost tipped over face first. Glenda hobbled around the chest. air and knelt before the old woman. Every muscle and sinew in her body screamed in unison, but she just grit her teeth and took it. Glenda had a good look at the decrepitude before her eyes. Mrs. Tip's face was bright red and swollen. Dry saliva had crusted in yellowish clumps all over her chin. Her few remaining strands of whitish hair clung to her skull like wet, dead worms. Her lips had cracked almost down the middle, and her eyebrows had burned away. But her beady

eyes retained lucidity, no doubt about it, and stared straight into hers. I know you took my money, you thieving bitch. You and my husband, whom I saw to it that he paid for his indiscretions with that cuntish ball counter. Both of you are good for nothing, little bitches. Give me back my money. Glenda looked over the old woman's shoulder. A whole bunch of them, far too many to count now, maybe 300 yards away.

Then she looked straight into Mrs. Tips' beady gray eyes. I took you out of the house because I felt sorry for you. Stupid of me, maybe, after the way you treated me all these years. But I didn't want you to die alone in that house. And you would have died. Believe you, me. She paused to look over the old woman's shoulders again. 250 yards, if that.

Now, looks like we're both going to pay for our little sins in this purgatory. Yes, I did take your... fucking money. And you know what, Mrs. Stipps? I am in too much pain to give a shit anymore. Glenda stood up. Her knees creak audibly and her hips almost gave up. But she managed, just. Gathering the last of her strength, she pushed the handles downward and pivot the chair all the way around. What are you doing, you crazy bitch? I want my money back and I need to use the facilities again. Glenda said nothing. She tossed the envelope onto the ground behind her,

grabbed the push handles with hands she couldn't really feel, and made a running start that caused her unbelievable pain, and pushed the chair towards their pursuers. B-a-bitch! Was Mrs. Tips' last hurrah as the chair trundled down the road straight to the approaching mob with an awful racket? Glenda turned around. picked up the envelope and kept marching on for what else was there for her to do. By midday, Glenda Thorne could no longer walk. All she could do was laboriously drag her left leg, which had seized hours before and was now stiff as a tree branch. The punishing sun had once again taken its commanding position in the sky. The heat had completely burned off the epidermis of her face

and began charing her dermis. Her eyebrows were seared. Her cheeks were blackened, hollow spots. Her hair, drenched in sweat, clung to her swollen face in horrid, limp streaks. Her lips were parched. The tip of her nose was the color of coal, and she could not feel any of this. Still, she pushed on, clutching the envelope in hands that had little skin left. She hadn't looked back in a long time, but they were still there, 50, 60, or a hundred of them. Who knew? She could hear them, barely, as her hearing was beginning to go, and she could hear their hungry moans. And they were real close. Then, movement ahead, half-blinded as she was, Glenda could tell it was a car driving towards her.

A car! With the titanic effort of sheer will and hope, she waved her arms. Her joints sang an opera of sharp pain, but she ignored it. The car screeched to a halt just ahead of her, and a man stepped out. Glenda tried to talk.

Her lips moved, but her bone-dry throat refused to make any sound. she swallowed hard with blinding torment and some feeble words came out. Please, I need help, she said, and stretched her scrawny arms towards the man. Let me go with you, please. Whether the man heard or understood her, she couldn't tell. He just sort of squinted and looked at the ruined, moaning human shambling towards the car with outstretched arms. Jesus Christ, I think she's one of them, the man said.

And there's more behind her. Frank, get back into the fucking car and let's go. A woman's voice called from inside the vehicle. Please. Glenda said, or attempted to say, I have money. She waved the envelope. I have money.

But Frank had a money. already reversed the car and sped away in the opposite direction. I have fucking money. Glenda sort of whispered as her right leg finally buckled. She fell on her ass, and her entire body screamed in agony as soon as she hit the ground. She spun slowly around. 100 yards separated what was left of her from the pursuing mob. Through failing eyes, Glenda saw that one of them was pushing.

the empty wheelchair, and something about that struck her as the funniest thing she had ever seen in her 36 years of life. Her crack lips curled into a painful smile. Then, a chuckle, followed by a hearty, if slightly hoarse, belly laugh that lit every nerve and muscle in her body on fire. But she kept laughing through the pain, all the same. Amidst the hysterical laughing fit, Glenda ripped the envelope open and hundreds of bills scattered around the road. I have money! She shouted to no one in particular.

She was still laughing when the mob reached her. For what else could she do? And finally, when terrified mine workers demand a tunnel be collapsed despite co-workers still inside, those on the surface must face something impossible. from writer Ryan Hanson, creepy presents, sealed in the mines. Miners are a superstitious lot. They tend to believe in all kinds of things like lucky monuments and rituals,

stuff that was supposed to ensure they would make it out of the underground caverns they spend their workdays in. After all, blind faith is all a man has when the walls have caved in. The air is stinging, and he's lying there with nothing to do but wait. to be rescued. But the superstition minors are most serious about it is that you should never leave someone underground. Even if it's just to dig up their dead bodies, miners don't leave one another behind. They believe that leaving someone down there will curse them to spend the rest of eternity

below the surface, forced to haunt the very caves that killed them. It's a horrible fate. And one no miner would wish on any of their colleagues, not even the worst of them. Maybe that was why I was such a big deal when, in the middle of a seemingly normal shift, a small mining team came running out of the cavern like a bat out of hell, yelling and screaming for the topside team to seal the entrance. Dynamite, Blunt Force cave in. They didn't care.

They wanted that thing sealed. They didn't seem to care that a dozen men were still inside. It wasn't something anyone expected. It also wasn't something any self-respective. and crew would do at the drop of a hat. So the topside crew tried to get answers as to what was going on before they did anything. The underground crew screaming all the while. That left the mining tunnel wide open for all of hell to come crawling out.

The bickering of the men did little to disguise the scraping of something sharp against the raged edges of the cave's rocks. And soon, every miner's attention was directed toward the black pit just in time to catch sight of the abiding. domination that scuttled out. At a height of over three heads taller than any man stood a creature with waxy skin, sunken eyes, and a head that would look more fitting in a cheesy alien movie than any were real. But the most disturbing part to that humanoid thing was its horrifically wide smile. The thing seemed to cut its face in half, set far too high and showing far too many teeth.

That smile was proof that monster was never supposed to set foot outside of the shadows cast by the earth. It was barely a moment before the creature leapt, grabbing the nearest man by the edges of his face and hoisting him into the air. His horrified screams were sure to haunt the men's nightmares. Even as they were cut short with a wet crunch as the beast crushed his skull with one clawed hand. That set the men into a frenzy. some running, some scrambling for their radios, and some brave souls reaching for anything they could use to defend themselves. It was one of these men that jumped into the nearest bulldozer, its engines still running from when its operator fled just moments before. This dozer was an old one, even by the history of the mine, but it still had just enough power to move rocks and more than enough power to move a monster.

The man pushed the dozer to its limits. The old diesel engines screaming with effort as the blade at the front of the vehicle collided with the creature, pinning its back against solid rock. It let out an inhuman whale bits of bone and flesh flying from its hands as it flailed. But even so, the man pressed forward. He didn't let up. Not as a creature flailed, not as it cried, not even when the tips of its long claws carved a path towards his face. dutifully, the dozer pushed forward, exactly the way it was designed, cutting through pale, lumpy flesh the same way it would wet sand.

A thick black blood coated the ground in the equipment, flowing freely from the monster's torn skin, its panic thrash in, only ripping it further. Men cover their ears in hopes to hide from its wailing, some of their ears bleeding from the intensity of the cries. But soon the volume of the whales waned, the thrashing weakened, and the monster's head dip, growing still as the blood flow slowed. Nearby men began to approach, cautiously looking for any movement. But when none came, they wrenched it out from where it was pinned, dragging its mango body back the way it came. From there, a debate began about what to do with a creature. Some of the men wanted to throw it back into the pit, closed the open.

and let the crumbling earth handle the rest. Other men wanted to call someone to help, but no one knew who could even help with something like that. Unfortunately, the debate was never able to reach its natural conclusion, as in one jerking motion, the creature gasped for breath, lashing out and cutting down three men. Several more jumped on it, but by then it had resumed its desperate thrashing,

sending some miners flying and even more running away, bleeding. It had almost freed itself when the man in the dozer cried out in a frustrated rage. His anger at seeing his friends being killed surfacing with a broken cry. He shifted the motor back into drive and shoved the creature the rest of the way back into the tunnels, the cab of the dozer taking up the rest of the opening, preventing the escape. What neither of them knew was that in the previous struggle, the creature damaged the fuel line, Leading to a leak gradual enough to escape notice long enough to build and build and build until. The man was pulled from the cab just as a vehicle burst in flames, though it did not save him from the flames that caught his coat and licked at his flesh.

As bad as he had it, the creature had it far worse as the inhuman wailing picked up again, hardly even dampened by the thick earth as it reached the men's ears. It held for as long as the dozer did, and after several moments, the flames were followed by an explosion that would put the mine's dynamite to shame. The entrance to the mine folded inward like wet tissue paper, rock and soil falling into the unplanned grave, burying the horror the men had endured just as quickly as it had been on earth. A silent agreement was made that day as the men packed the soil hard and tight around the old entrance. This was the one time that would condemn their fellow miners to spend. the rest of eternity under the earth. Perhaps it was cowardice that we left them down there.

Perhaps it was the wisest decision we could make given the circumstances, but I'll never forget the men we lost that day, both to the creature's hands and under the earth. I think about them every time I pass the old mine. I think about them every time the scars on my face ache. I cannot change the past, nor can I save my old friends from their fate, but I can keep it from happening again. I can make sure that the soil is never disturbed

and that whatever was down there can never come out again. So, I implore you to listen to me when I tell you. Don't go near the mines. For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us at CreepyPod on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons Sherrillite licensing or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.