Creepy - Painted Shut

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Always pay attention to the warning signs...***Content Warning: gore***Written by Red Creek Young***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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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 Painted Shut Written by Red Creek Young. narrated by Alicia Atkins and produced by Steve Blisen.

I moved out here for work about 11 months ago. I discovered that because vacation towns are so bloody expensive to actually reside in, most employers will offer some sort of subsidized housing. That's not to say it'll be the sketchy sort of residence you'd expect from a lower income situation. Though let me tell you it very well can be. Once you find yourself in a room with three beds, no roommates with a common, language and nothing else beyond a bathroom and a balcony? Well, at least it's got an ocean view, right?

But thankfully with this new job, I ditched that freak show for the more ideal private cottage in the woods off the edge of the next town over. Now, here's red flag number one. This part of town isn't on any map. My actual address doesn't show up on GPS. I really didn't think twice about it because honestly the maps are all kind of skewed to favor tourists. and steer them to the resort areas.

The GPS thing didn't seem weird either, because this whole area consists of the last scraps of woods and beaches after a significant amount of farmland. Cell reception and the like aren't great out here. It's an old-ass township preserved to a vacation retreat, so it really shouldn't matter. Red flag number two, I justified in much the same manner. The closest hospital is well over an hour away.

I didn't grow up too far from here, and there were hospitals 30 minutes in any direction, give or take. But I knew that the more rural places had further drives than that, so it really didn't set off any alarm bells. I mean, if it's a resort town, it's really only populated in the summertime. How could they possibly budget a hospital closer to a town with so few residents? It just didn't strike me as odd, or dangerous for that matter. Just extremely isolated, I suppose.

Back to what I was saying. Before the season started this year, my new job offered me a cottage to stay local. It's small, but cozy. Very 1970s beach bungalow. It always smells like the ocean combined with the thick musk of constantly damp woodlands. It's set pretty far off the main road, but I actually have a couple of neighbors. The majority of the road is entirely empty, except this one T-shaped section of closely grouped cottages. Personally, I find my cottage to be picturesque.

The outside is dingy white and chipping, but in a charming way. The white still manages to look clean with the trellises of beech roses climbing up the side of the big bay windows. The inside is similarly lived in, but in a comfortable way. Like when you've worn a pair of vans so long that they get smooth and soft and wear like a second skin. I felt immediately at home here. The studio style setup didn't really strike me as a second.

small or cramped, but rather a romanticized cabin-type getaway. My only real complaints here are the lack of air conditioning and the fact that it's constantly damp, like humidity to the point of essentially drowning in slow motion. Fans help, an AC unit would help significantly more, but alas, I'm stuck with the halacious heat pumped out by the dehumidifier struggling to keep up as it pulls gallon after gallon of water from the soupy air I'm suffocating in. So this is how I first came to realize that the dip shit that painted the place last, my guess, to polish the place up, for the next residence, since maintenance on staff housing isn't actually a thing,

painted every fucking window shut. Beyond frustrating. And of course, not just a simple coat that could be chipped away. This was obviously done hastily in quite a few layers with what I can only describe the same thick, coating of crap they used to cover the cinder block walls of schools and jail sales. There was no budging these goddamn windows, and zero hope of ever experiencing a crossbreast to break up this stifling muggyness. This is where the common sense ought to have kicked in. Why would it make any sense for someone to paint over the windows like a barbarian,

in multiple coatings of this thick, shitty paint when it's so consistently too hot here? What purpose could that really have served? Were the windows shitty and that was the landlord's way of asking me not to open them? By making it physically impossible to do so? Or like a locked door, did it serve some greater purpose to firmly state, this needs to stay shut? But, as the excessively ordinary tends to, it faded into the background noise of other thoughts.

Beyond being treacherously aggravated that it was. stuffy as hell in here, what more thought was there to really give to the windows being painted shut? So, having disregarded this random annoyance past those first few days adjusting to trying to sleep and sweltering heat, I didn't string all this shit together until well after it was too late. The windows weren't the only thing in the cottage painted shut. Inside the small closet in my bathroom, there's what looks like a fuse box set back into the wall, behind the water heater that was painted over with the same thick and sloppy bullshit as the windows. Again, why would that ever seem relevant?

The storms out here beat the shit out of little places like this, and I figured they'd probably redone the electricity at some point and move the fuse box to its current place in the kitchen, and painted over this one because it was cheaper than removing it from a place nobody was likely to notice or care about it anyways. The last place that was painted shut didn't really look like a place. place at all. There was a small rectangle in the center of the ceiling, maybe two feet by three, that had molding around it and thick paint over the crevices between the two. No visible hinges,

no pull string or latch, nothing to really suggest that it was an attic. But what else could it be? And from the outside, the cottage looked to have a high enough peak for there to be a small storage loft above the entire main room. Naturally, I was curious, why they would paint it shut, but maybe the ceiling was rotting or something, and they thought it was too dangerous to leave accessible and not dangerous enough to justify fixing it either. So the paintover solution won out again. Similarly, my curiosity was compelling enough for me to consider checking it out, but not strong enough for me to actually pursue it beyond the thought. None of this could be described as anything but excessively ordinary. And that's where we always

want a victim in a movie to see the imminent danger. That is so much more obvious to us as the audience, the observers. I noticed these things, but I never gave any of them a second or third thought, until I stopped being able to sleep. I found every excuse for the sleep deprivation I could at first. Maybe I was homesick. Maybe I was anxious from work. It's hot as hell. That must be waking me up. I should drink more water. I'm probably just dehydrated. But nothing stuck. Nothing quite fit the bill for waking me up time and time again. It's like, you know the feeling when you're just sure you're being watched? Even when you can't find the eyes you feel on the back of your neck, something in you is just unshakably positive that there's someone or something watching you.

I woke up one ever so slightly cooler night with that exact notion, and I heard what sounded precisely like footsteps picking their way carefully over the dead leaves in the woods just beyond the window next to my bed. But again, that wasn't really out of the ordinary. Was it? Deer, raccoon, a stray cat? A lot of critters had full rights to be wandering by my window while I slept. But after a few days, that wasn't the only noise waking me up anymore. I woke several nights to different moaning and groaning and squeaking from all different places in the ceiling.

It was quiet enough to pretend it was the house settling, or the wind, or whatever the hell one tells themselves when they live alone and hear a bump in the night. By the third series night of when my conviction was absolute that I had heard them, they petered out and then stopped altogether, only to be replaced by a new set of noises in the ceiling. But of course, the skittered steps of animals are pretty easy to identify and cope with. That's not to say I was stoked about it. No, I was quite put out to hear these scurrying critters start to fight each other. And not just a scrabble here and there. This was worse. What put me off kilter were the growls and shrieks and gurgling sounds that sounded like fight after fight was ending in blood.

And a lot of it. I could hear the gurgling gasp of something struggling for air and drowning in their own blood. Worse still, in the silence that followed, there were even more awful noises, slurping like they were eating the fallen opponent. I'd always disliked hearing feral cats fight from afar. So to be lying in bed beneath these vicious brawls with bonus carcass-eating sounds was beyond unsettling. Okay, more unsettling and finally worthy of taking... action was the stench. I was sure there had to be multiple large, dead raccoon corpses rotting up

there. But some silly part of me had hoped they'd been on the roof or something. I mean, I didn't smell anything at first. And if it wasn't directly affecting me beyond creeping me out, was I really going to go tearing into the ceiling of this place? There was no way my employers were going to come and pay a professional to come in and cut into the ceiling. They wouldn't have let the last guy paint the goddamn attic shut if there was even a remote possibility of needing to get back up there. Which actually, judging by the mice and other tiny roommates I'd grown accustomed to, this was a totally distinct possibility. So why had they painted the fucking attic shut? Then the pieces started to fit together a bit after a few more days passed. I had noticed

the smell on occasion when I was outside. When the wind hit just right, I did. get a whiff of something far worse than death. But just as quickly, it would be replaced by the constant sea breeze ever present in the area. Not like I could have followed it to the source if I'd tried. But as the days went on, I was sure the smell was starting to linger inside, and it must be coming from my attic. More prevalently, as I lay awake night after night, why did this smell so much fucking worse than roadkill? I've smelled roadkill plenty. It's sickenly sweet to the point of gagging, but somewhat musky and earthy too. I'm not saying it smells good, not at all, but it most definitely had never smelled this bad before either.

I brought it up at work, and sure as shit they hit me with the, well, that's not all that uncommon for living in an area like this, and told me there's tools in the shed and to take whatever I thought I might need to get into the attic and move the dead animal to the woods. So to add to my You deserve to be a victim in a horror movie resume I didn't really feel like a saw or any other power tools were really in my range of abilities so I borrowed nothing but a ladder and a hammer and chisel

It was going to be time-consuming But I had two days off to take care of the issue And several joints rolled to help pass the time It was going to be a grueling task But fuck it So was life Took me a little over an hour But hey, let's pretend it was a workout.

And not a weed-induced, half-ass aggravated assault on my ceiling. I immediately regretted all of this. The first thing my fingers touched after I moved the hatch out of my way was wet, sticky, gooey, and smelled worse than rotting bile. Like what I was choking back, but a thousand times worse. Somehow having gloves on really didn't make me feel much better about the situation. I climbed back down enough to get a look at my gloved appendage and staggered down the rest of the rungs in the days. The fingertips of the gloves were unmistakably covered in blood.

Fuck me. It wasn't bad enough that I was climbing through this fucking hole in my ceiling in pursuit of animal carcasses. But there was substantial blood involved? Fucking figures. I grabbed a flashlight and sprayed the inside of my makeshift bandana mask with Chanel number five. Hey, it might have been a gross job, but the sweet smell of expensive perfume seemed preferable to mixing it with vanilla somehow.

I climbed to the very top of the ladder this time and leaned back against the open hatch to brace myself for whatever I was about to discover rotting above me. As I shine the flashlight around the cramped little storage loft, I could feel the pistons misfiring between my eyes and my conscious mind. There were bodies up there all right. If you could even call them that. The treacherous smell seeping from the attic

was coming from at least four separate human bodies decomposed almost beyond recognition. It looked as though their viscera had burst through the skin in a bloody rebellion. The faces barely had flesh to them and what little was left was sunken in leaving the corpses to look desperate and despaired. Jaws locked and would look like permanent agonizing screams

for help that would never come. I wanted to scream myself. but somehow couldn't command my body to activate the right muscles to create the plea for help. In fact, I couldn't seem to get a single muscle to budge for a full minute before they all contracted at once sending me hurtling down the ladder towards my door. No cell service, no landline. I ran like hell for the beautiful beacon of light from my neighbor's porch behind me. The light made me think they were more than likely home and awake and I could hug them.

I was so relieved at the very thought of living human company after what I just discovered. I threw myself at their door, banging with both fists, ready to open the damn thing myself, I was so freaked out. Much to my relief. They came immediately to answer the racket I was making and didn't think twice before uttering me inside. As I blurted out the terror I was trying to understand. The 30-something-year-old professor-looking type that lived behind me managed to keep his shit together. while I continued to gasp for air explaining that we needed to call the police.

He first showed me to a chair at his kitchen table and brought me a glass of water, instead of reaching for the landline on the wall beside the entryway. He sat down across from me and folded his hands on the table. He asked me several questions in a tone as though he was asking me if I had ever been to New Jersey before. His lips seemed like they were pulled up just ever so slightly, a shadow of a mocking smile. I answered as briefly and accurately as I was physically capable of, as I went into shock, desperate to hear him phone the fucking police already.

And as if suddenly realizing I'd been scared shitless the whole time, he sprang up for the phone and dialed 911. While we waited and I continued to sip on my glass of water, swallowing the shakiness off, the man began to tell me about the previous tenant. His eyes locked behind me, staring blankly in the direction I'd just want. fled from. He told me all about how the guy who had my job and home before me, just up and disappeared one day. No notice, no explanation, didn't even pack his things. His best bet was that the previous tenant was rotting up in the attic while we spoke. I'm not going to lie. My gut immediately told me it was weird as fuck that this guy was asking me fucking questions, and casually

talking about whoever bailed without notice and suggesting I just discovered his decomposing corpse. But I decided if he knew anything about the guy. Maybe he could answer me while he painted the windows and attic shut. Hell, maybe this guy knew exactly who the culprit was, and could confirm it for me right now and notify the police who they are as soon as they arrived? I shouldn't have opened my mouth. I shouldn't have asked questions I didn't want the answers to. My word-vomited a theory to him that maybe the previous tenant had killed all those people,

and he painted the place shut to try and keep the smell. in. But that didn't explain why the electrical panel had been painted shut. And I can't unhear his lazy suggestion if he painted the place to keep the smell in. Wouldn't it make sense he painted the panel to keep curious little things like you out? Just as I saw the slow motion blue and red flash of safety, my heart picked up its pace as I re-heard what he'd said on loop in my head and realized it sounded like a threat more than an answer. And everything went black. I woke up in the back of an ambulance.

Immediately, I registered the throb on the side of my head where he must have hit me. But more violently, I felt waves of intense pain inside my mouth. Instinctively, my tongue shot to the source of the pain to investigate its cause. All four of my canine teeth were missing. What the actual fuck had just happened to me? And then it clicked. I had raced to the murderer to tell him about the fucking murdered bodies I had just found in my attic. This must be how horror movie survivors feel.

Like how on earth am I not dead for such sheer stupidity? He had my goddamn teeth, though. That was enough to turn my stomach into a knot trying to strangle itself. Why would he take my teeth and not murder me? Was it because the cops were right there? Why didn't he just murder me when my dumb ass came running through his eyes? door. The police interviewed me at the hospital after I was scanned and patched and deemed not worse for the wear, all things considered. They'd run the name of the resident who lived behind me as

soon as they found me on the floor. They were proud to tell me he was already in police custody, so I had nothing to worry about. They were clearly uncomfortable to tell me, as far as why I was now short, four sharp teeth. Well, so were each of the bodies they removed from my attic. Worse yet, they told me that in each case, the wounds were significantly anti-mortem. The bones of the jaws had healed entirely from the trauma of them ripping out. Along with the significant levels of cortisol they found in the pool of blood, the utter terror etched into the melted faces led them to believe that this serial killer thrived off the fear he caused his victims. He marked them with the traumatic event they woke up from unknowingly.

then hunted them and killed them torturously. Essentially, the asshats just confirmed the heads up that he was absolutely 100% planning to brutally fucking murder me. Sick. The good news was that my parents were coming out to get me first thing in the morning. The fucked news? I thought the hospital was short on beds. My injuries were considerably minor compared to some of the waiting room.

They got the guy. there was no reason for me to be kept in the hospital overnight. The cop that broke the news to me seemed to genuinely feel bad for me. He insisted that I would get past this, and even went into detail about the sick fuck using painter's plastic, and the place being cleaned up and the attic sealed. And all, one day it'll be like it never happened, bullshit. But there was no way I was going back to that fucking house.

not even if the crime scene was cleaned up. A while later a nurse turned up to let me know they'd been in touch with my bosses, and a co-worker staying in staff housing nearby would come to get me, and I would stay with them for the night until my folks made it out. Turns out, that was the passive-aggressive version of, get the fuck out. We have patients who actually need these beds. And I finally had a straight-up breakdown.

It hit me all at once. And these people didn't even seem concerned. Someone had ripped my teeth from my face and planned to murder me. But it was all over now and I needed to start coping. I didn't even realize I was screaming until there were hands holding me down and the faces of her mind telling me to stop fucking screaming. The last thing I remember was seeing the needle jabbed into my arm. I woke up in the bed of the cottage. covers kick to the floor, drenched in sweat and horrifically thirsty.

I couldn't fathom how my mind had come up with such a detailed, fucked-up nightmare that could feel so earth-shatteringly real. There were enough obvious details I'd pulled from reality. The noise is the smell. But why was I so chill when they said a co-worker would come and get me? The other staff housing is in a different town. I didn't know anyone at that job well enough for them to come and get me from a hospital and it just be normal.

Come to think of it, that's where the dream got blurry. Did I just willingly hop in the car with them? Was it normal? And why did my dream self run to the house behind me? I couldn't remember if I'd ever seen anyone come or go from there. I got a soft-smoking before bed. I never wanted to feel that level of terror again. Fuck horror stories, movies, Halloween.

I was ready to kick the ass of anyone or anything that could twist my stomach with such gut-wrenching fear. As I dragged myself out of bed to get a big glass of water to wash away the creepy feelings, I noticed a new smell. It grew stronger as I walked across the room to my fridge. The smell of wet paint. I stopped dead in my tracks. As I followed the chemical dizzying aroma to its source, I noticed a puddle of fresh dried paint.

on the floor. My door was painted shut. From the inside. I opened my mouth to scream and choked on it when my reflection in the door's window showed a mouth, Sands, canine teeth. I let my gut instincts take over this time and grab the biggest knife from the magnet on the wall and spun around the room, investigating. Nothing out of place. Fuck bedskirts. I could see straight under that bitch from where I stood in my defensive panicked crouch holding onto my sanity in the form of the blade that stood between me and whoever painted us in here.

I had to check the bathroom, the shower, or closet. Could easily have concealed whatever freak show was torturing me like this. I held my breath as I shuffled one shaky foot in front of the other, through the open bathroom door. Closet first so that my back would never be

to the unchecked hiding place. I yanked open one door. and use the elbow of the knife hand to push the other out of my way, as my eyes raked the alcove for serial killers. Nothing. I immediately shot to the shower, convinced the other occupant of the cottage would pop out at me. But the curtain was open, the stall, empty.

I can't say what made me do it, but knowing that I was alone, something inside me needed to know what was inside that electrical panel. I used the tip of the knife to carve in the paint. and quickly got frustrated and decided to pry the fucker open. If it bends the stupid knife, it did. There was no electrical panel behind the metal door. Nothing, but a small velvet drawstring pouch.

I pulled the top open and dumped the contents out on the counter. The ringing in my ears was so loud. I scarcely heard the dozens of canine teeth clinking against the vinyl. I was shaking to the point. that my limbs were bordering on futility when I finally heard his footsteps above me. I didn't give any of it a second thought. Hell, I don't even think I gave it a first thought, to be honest. The next thing I knew I was flinging myself at full tilt toward my kitchen table.

I snatched my keys and phone from the usual resting place, in the same motion as catapulting myself off the table and through the big bay windows. I heard the glass shatter. I saw the ground coming quickly at my face, but I felt nothing but the air flowing in and out of my lungs and a raspy gasping. I fully expected my car to be disabled, but fuck going to a neighbor for help. I tried it, and the keys blessedly unlocked my sanctuary and my getaway.

My blood went cold, as I realized I'd thrown myself in the car with such desperation that I hadn't checked the back seat. My breath caught in my throat as I realized my mistake. I spun with my phone in my hand like I had held the knife, but saw nothing in the car but the usual crap littering my back seats, now littering the floor. I was going to hurl from the constant adrenaline screaming through my body every other breath and scare. I took one last glance up at my picturesque beach cottage with the destroyed bay windows where my body had just been.

It was pretty in a grotesque way, and I can't believe. my brain was able to register that, because the next thing I noticed was the attic hatch hanging open. I peeled the fuck out and started driving like my life depended on it. I knew it was about a 20-minute drive inland until I had cell service to call for help. But no one else on the rural woodsy roads, but me flying as far as my car was willing. I thought I could probably make it there and ate. And then it hit me. I drove a hatchback. The back seats both fold. down. All my crap was inexplicably on the floor. I never checked the trunk. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, please

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