Creepy - Tarantula Hawk & The Universe is Mostly Void

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Tarantula Hawk***Written by: Chris Bradburn and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***The Universe is Mostly Void***Written by: Richard Scanland and Narrated by: JV Hampton-VanSant***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents.

Tarantula Hawk. Written by Chris Bradburn and narrated by Need to Fort. On reflection, it was probably for the best that they didn't tell us the world was ending. The panic would have been unbelievable. I can see why the governments of the world kept it quiet. Now, I'm not a bootlicker, sycophant, or anything like. that. I've attended my fair share of pension protests. I've signed a shitload of change.org petitions, etc., etc. I mean, fuck, what would you do in their position? All in all, it was pretty

well done, very subtle. Nothing you would ever link back to what it really was, until it was far too late. Started with a few high-profile suicides. Several guys who worked for Boeing tried to go to the press and were found with two gunshots to the back of the head. Terrible sadness. Luckily, they wrote notes before they took their own lives. Now, here's the kicker. The news stories and online discussions all revolved around it being linked to Boeing cutting corners for safety procedures. That was genius. It was so believable. I think Mr. Murdoch earned his spot on the shuttle coming up with that little scheme. Next came high-profile people being really, really keen to get up into space. Bezos sent a load of celebrities as a test. The cover story was it was a

concert, even had them sing a little bit. They made sure to pick the most vacuous people. They made sure to pick the most vacuous people to go and hold a press conference soon as they came back down. All attention was focused on the meaningless shit the celebrities were coming out with. Meanwhile, some very smart people covertly collected the data from the shuttle, i.e., the real reason they went up there. Nobody questioned when Musk ramped up his SpaceX's test flights either. Well, just kind of assumed he wanted to rule his own planet. Fuck, he probably still does, to be fair.

Emperor of Mars, chief architect of the red planet, King X of X. It'll be crazy, I'm sure. I guarantee he will have been on the first actual rocket out of here. Like I said, really cleverly done. We were all so used to crazy news that this stuff just fit. Nobody even really questioned it. Most of the Southern Hemisphere was experiencing a most unusual amount of floods. Indonesia was devastated by two tsunamis in as many weeks.

There were wars going on, crazy extreme politics, arguments about pronouns, etc., etc. It kept us really, really distracted from caring about what came next. My first inkling that something else was going on was when I saw the news articles about the UK government carrying out testing to dim the sun by introducing more cloud cover. Within days, it was echoed by most other governments of the world, claimed as a breakthrough way to combat climate change. That was pretty left field as an approach, a bit extreme.

However, what really got me interested was that they started doing the experiments at night, and they started them immediately. Why, I wondered. As a previously avid stargazer, I was pretty peeved at this. There wasn't a town in Scotland where you could see the night sky clearly anymore. Friends from the U.S., a couple from Thailand, a German guy, and another pal from New Zealand,

all reported the same thing. It was really peculiar. We were all part of a very small stargazing community. We'd share pictures and videos of our exploits. We all dreamed to finding some evidence of intelligent life out there in the darkness. It was what brought us together. I swear to God, we were the most passionate nerds you could find. We had some weirdos as well, though.

The price of technology improving so much was that the barrier to entry into the stargazing hobby was much lower now. I remember one guy from the Philippines absolutely lost his mind about six months ago. This was around the time the Boeing suicides happened. One of the expats who lived in Thailand knew him loosely, apparently a really normal guy until one day he wasn't. He started writing long diatribes on the forums and posting the same threads over and over, always the same shit about a shadow beyond gay,

Jupiter that blocked out a whole section of stars and was moving at speeds we couldn't comprehend. We looked over the pictures once, and nobody was able to come to any real conclusion. Most of us chalked it up as some kind of satellite and brushed it off. We weren't conspiracy theorists. There was no need to get ourselves worked up over a blur. This guy wouldn't give it up, though. He kept it up until we had to ban him. Then he kept coming back on new accounts until eventually we had to block the whole of the Philippines from accessing the site.

In hindsight, it was a dumb move. Not that anything could have been done, though. Anyway, back to the clouds. I'm getting distracted. The experiments really screwed us over. Soon as it started to get dark each day, low clouds would roll in, making looking up at the night sky pointless. By the time full dark came,

the heavens were just a black canvas of nothingness. It would have been amazing for Bob Ross, but it just pissed us off. We had nothing to do for our hobbies anymore. It carried on for weeks. We hoped the tests would end, but they never did. The news started mentioning it less and less. Interest waned, and it started to become the new normal.

It's amazing what humans will accept when there's other distractions in their face. A few high-profile instances of airplanes being shot down reduced international travel by significant amounts. That really annoyed us. Not only were we unable to see the stars anymore, but the conditions for doing it were better than it had been for decades. So, we made a plan. We had to. Nobody was talking about it online. Any posts we made on Instagram or Facebook would gain barely any likes or comments.

People really didn't seem to notice or care that the stars weren't visible anymore. We just wanted people to care. Asking chat GPT didn't yield anything useful either. It would always deviate and start talking about how important clouds were, never answered any questions about cloud cover directly. Of course, in hindsight, I realize why. At the time, we just rolled our eyes at the Internet being stupid. Anyway, back to it.

We made a plan. Each of us would take our best equipment to the highest point we could get to, and we would take pictures. We would leave the cameras running from sundown to sunup, capturing as much of the sky as we could. Then, we would stitch the results together, There was a surprising amount of maths involved, but we managed it. Eventually, we had our vectors of the night sky that we would capture.

There were some gaps, of course. Good fucking luck getting someone to the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but we did what we could. It was an idealistic goal. We had this loose idea that maybe we could remind the world just how beautiful the night sky was and changed the climate experiments. Maybe it would spur conversation and we'd have some ability to see our beautiful night stars again. How naive we were. We did it, though.

That was pretty easy. We climbed to the highest points we could get to. I went north into the highlands and climbed Ben Nevis. I camped up there. It was eerie how still weather was most nights once the clouds came in. No wind or chill at all. There came a point where I turned around. after setting up my equipment and had all my lights turned off.

There was nothing in front of me. The darkness was pressing in and it felt like I was floating at the top of the world. I had this crazy thought that I was going to be pulled off my feet and float away from the earth forever, lost in space. Like I said, eerie. It worked, though, our pictures. It worked a little too well, actually. It took about a week for us to stitch together the,

results using Photoshop. We had to do it all by hand because the AI enhancement features would always corrupt the project. Every time, without fail. We were being watched, of course. We just didn't know it. The Discord calls were full of foul language each time it happened. We blame the technology. That's not fair, though. It was working exactly as intended. So, we eventually had to put together maybe a dozen pictures, a dozen very high quality, very big pictures. The file size was huge. It would take hours to look over each section of the night sky. Over around 12 hours of image captured, we each got maybe one or two frames each of usable

night sky footage, only from when the clouds would thin slightly. Then we would enhance these frames and clean it up by hand. it was painstaking. They ever seen videos of art restorationists working on priceless paintings? This was our version of that. Then, we started to look at the results. It sounds cliche, but we had no fucking clue

what we were looking at when we first saw it. Took several hours of referencing each of the images before we accepted it looked the same in each picture. I'm still not entirely sure I believe it now. Although, with all that's happened, we were, unfortunately, on the right track. Once we got our head around what we were seeing, we tried to gather as much information as possible. We thought we were the only ones who knew, you know, because of the cloud cover. So we thought we'd be able to give these pictures to some scientists, and they would band together and save the world?

Yeah, okay, I know how stupid I sound. I like to look at stars that doesn't make me anything special. I realize that now more than ever. I just missed having purpose in my life. Mapping the night skies was what I like to do with my time. We didn't know what the shadow was. And to be fair, we still don't. We just know it was stretching between the moon

and was reaching towards Earth. It stretched out from the surface in a razor-thin line on our pictures. It looked the same way people talk about seeing Hadrian's wall from space. Or was it the Great Wall of China? Fuck knows, I forget. But it was stretching towards us. The picture showed it was maybe a quarter of the distance towards us.

That's, what, 75,000 miles maybe? We needed to tell the world. So, like the Good Samaritans we were, we sent a dossier of, of what we'd seen to the media, our local government, even university staff, anyone we thought of who could help. Of a dozen would-be do-goaters, we spanned five countries. Not a single one of us received any kind of response. Total blackout. Nobody returned our direct messages or emails or even phone calls. No acknowledgement. Nothing. The only response I received, was from an astronomer at the beamish dark sky observatory in Durham.

She told me she'd pass on my photos for someone to deal with. Then, the line went dead. At the time, I called her a rude cow after she hung up. A week later is when the accidents began. America reacted to us first. The two U.S. guys, their wives, sent us messages on their accounts. tearfully told us they'd been on a camping trip together when they were mulled by a bear. We were all shocked and upset beyond words.

I felt something flicker inside me as I read their messages, though. Who the fuck goes camping in January? They lived in Colorado. Wasn't it meant to be cold as shit? And don't bears hibernate during the winter? And I'm also pretty sure they were both gay. Then again, they'd never come out, uh-huh, and said it to us. It was really weird, but the shock masked a lot of it.

We didn't have chance to ask any questions before. Their accounts became inactive. Last online, 28 days ago. I was a little paranoid after this. I started climbing Ben Nevis more and more. Got Thailand, Germany, and New Zealand to help from their vantage points. More evidence would surely raise awareness. In a world of 8 billion, we couldn't be the only ones who had noticed.

The odds of that were impossible. So why was nobody talking about it? Thailand went next. No word. She was an expat who lived there with her husband and their shared girlfriend. Polycule, I think it's called something weird. Anyway, she just went dark. Zip, zero, zilch.

No response. Last online. 16 days ago. New Zealand and Germany went at the same time. They were on a call with me when their doorbells rang at the same time. This is what really scared me. Germany had this dog-shit headset he used and it picked up everything. There was a muffled conversation before I heard him shout once.

Just once. Then everything went quiet. A few minutes later, he left the call. New Zealand muted herself before she answered the door. Eventually, she left as well. I got a call from Germany's girlfriend the next day. I'd never spoken to her before. Didn't even know he had a girlfriend.

She told me that he'd run a bath that night and cut his wrists. Apparently, she found out he'd been seeing a therapist for years without telling her. She only knew because she found his medication in the bathroom with him. The last text message he received was from a doctor, telling him. their appointment was being moved up, and he could be seen sooner. Nothing came from New Zealand at all, just gone. Last online, eight days ago. I've spent the past three days mainly watching nature documentaries.

One that caught my attention was about a tarantula hawk. These giant wasps would hunt tarantulas, paralyzing them with their stings before they drag them back to their nest. and lay an egg. It means as soon as the wains hatch, they've got a meal straight away. I would watch and laugh myself silly at the thought of it. I laughed until I was sick once. Isn't it odd the things you focus on?

It's only now it's too late that I realize what's going on. I stopped going out of the house some time after Thailand went. It seemed like I was being stared at in the street. Night was the worst. Sound carried really well in the stillness. I kept thinking I could hear breathing outside my house, people just watching and waiting. So I stayed home, and I watched nature documentaries to take my mind off at all.

The news stopped mentioning the clouds at all, even when I did watch it. Mars colony missions were moved up in schedule, and rockets have been taking off almost continuously for the past three days. Apparently, technology breakthroughs made it as safe as it could be. Of course, the richest went first. So, I stayed home and I watched TV. My internet went out a day ago. Oh, well, none of my friends are online anyway.

I've been taken to sitting in my bed drinking whiskey. Seems the only thing worth doing. My phone signal was lost two days ago now. It's just me and the TV. I'm typing this all on my laptop. Discord won't send this message anyway, but whatever. Whoever reads this is going to have a shitty day, I promise you. You'll find the letters I've already written to my parents in a separate document on my desktop. The folder is called buy, although they're not going to get to read it. When the doorbell rang a few minutes ago, I pissed myself.

And I have no shame in saying that. I'm dead now anyway. It's a wasted trip, boys. I've silenced myself. I shouted that down the stairs just then. I stood in my dressing gown shouting at the front door. It felt good to show some defiance. They've wasted a trip, though, bless them.

they should be home with their families. The TV just turned on to the news by itself, emergency broadcast. I turned it off before the presenters started to speak. Their faces told me everything I needed to know. They didn't even have makeup on. It's time. It's time now.

I killed myself about ten minutes after I finished writing this. Going to climb, into the bath and have a long sleep. I've got enough pills in Woodford Reserve to see me through. The banging on the door is getting more insistent now. I wish they'd fuck off. I'm doing their job for them. Sitting in the bathtub now, I've had my last drink and swallowed some of those lovely pills. It's for the best to do it this way.

Couldn't take the thought of what'll happen when they get here. I'd rather I'd be dead and gone beforehand. There was an announcement this morning that the clouds were not going to be there tonight. I don't want to be here when that happens. So, bye for now, I guess. Well, I'll be seeing most, if not all, of you, real, real soon. I just don't want to be one of the billions that looks up into the night sky and sees that the moon is hatched.

looked up to see that giant white moon with great black cracks across the surface and the spreading shadow of whatever was heading towards us. I have a sneaking suspicion that the clouds have gone tonight because they're ready to land now. I can't help but think how many people will look up and think of that documentary I was watching. How many will understand that we are the tarantuanche, And out there in the great void beyond is the tarantula hawk. Creepy presents.

The universe is mostly void, written by Richard Scanlan and narrated by J.V. Hampton Van Sant. Incident report. Filed by Dr. Edna Crow, December 15th, 2348. The incident aboard the research vessel known as the Wisdom's Edge is one of the strangest I've ever had to document. The ship and her crew of seven researchers were commissioned for a three-year voyage to the furthest reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. They were searching for the source of a mysterious radio signal. Six months into their mission, however, we lost contact with the Wisdom's Edge. When we arrived to retrieve the crew, they were nowhere to be found.

All we discovered was security camera footage, as well as a series of audio logs left by a biologist named Warren Schaefer. The following is a transcript of those audio logs. First entry My name is Dr. Warren Schaefer, and I'm the last one left. The rest of the crew is dead. Eight weeks ago, we had a catastrophic malfunction aboard the ship. Our engines and communication array completely failed, as well as the lighting in certain sectors of the ship.

Life support, heating, and artificial gravity all remained intact, although I'm left to wonder if it wouldn't have been better if we all suffocated right away. For the first few days, we were confident we would be rescued, that mission control would find us and bring us home early, or at the very least would bring us back to base until another vessel was ready for us to use. But that didn't happen. The first suicide occurred on the fifth day.

We were having breakfast in the mess hall when we realized our engineer, Michael Bruner, hadn't shown up. This was odd because he was usually the first in line for meals. I went to check on him in his quarters, only to find him hanging from a pipe in his room from the noose made from bed sheets. His eyes were glassy like a doll's, and his tongue protruded from his mouth. His hand gripped a piece of paper so tightly I had to break two of his fingers to pry it free. His skin felt cold, and I felt sick touching him. The note consisted of only two sentences.

No one is coming for us. I'm sorry. We dispose of his corpse out of the airlock. It may seem uncivilized to not wait to give him a proper burial when we return to Earth, but the ship has no morgue and none of us want to. wanted to occupy a vessel with a rotting corpse. I watched his body drift off into the vast nothingness of the cosmos. It turned over itself, like someone doing cartwheels in slow motion. Its face turned towards me the entire time.

Its eyes felt as though they were staring into the depths of my soul as the body drifted further away from the ship. Three more suicides occurred in the following two and a half weeks. Daniel Kramer, the computer scientist in charge of creating the program to decipher the signal, cut his throat in the middle of the night. Our medic, Jonathan Anders, and first mate Wesley Campbell, were found in the medical wing, lying in a puddle of blood-speckled vomit. We assumed they overdosed on a lethal mixture of men.

medication Anders cooked up. The remaining four of us were determined to wait it out, to keep the hopelessness at bay, but we hadn't expected cabin fever to set in so quickly. The walls of the ship felt like they were closing in tighter and tighter with each passing hour, and I felt like I was about to burst if I didn't get out soon. Within a few days of the double suicide, we were at each other's throats. I had argued with Donald Harriman, the linguist we had brought with us to translate any alien languages we might encounter. I don't remember what the argument was about now, but it must have been about something trivial.

I sat on my bed, still fuming, when I heard him scream. I ran into the mess hall to find Captain Theodore Banks standing over him with a bloody knife in his hand. His eyes were filled with rage and madness as he stared at Harrowman, who lay gurgling on the floor as he tried to breathe through a stab wound in his throat. I should have done something, attacked Captain Banks and tried to overpower him. But I am a coward, and I ran. Maybe if I hadn't done that, our astrophysicist would still be alive. I heard him scream from the deck while I cowered under my bed in my quarters, shaking like a leaf and crying like a terrified toddler.

I don't know what drove the captain over the edge of insanity. Maybe the isolation and the hopelessness finally got to him and he snapped, but if he was a It doesn't matter. When I finally got the courage to face him, I found him on the deck in the very same chair I sit in now, with long cuts running from his wrist to his forearms, the knife on the floor next to him. It was silent except for the drip, drip, drip of his blood. I can still hear the sound every time I try to sleep. Second entry

You're probably wondering why I haven't joined my colleagues in death. After all, I'm surrounded by means to kill myself. I could hang myself just like Bruner, throw myself out of the airlock, or drink myself to death in the mess hall's well-stocked bar. You probably think I'm trying to hold. hold out hope of being rescued. Honestly, I gave up on that idea after the captain lost his mind. The reason I haven't taken my own life yet is because I'm afraid. I'm not afraid of what might be

waiting for me on the other side. I've never been a religious man and I don't believe in any sort of afterlife. Instead, I'm afraid that it will be the wrong decision. I keep imagining myself swallowing a whole bottle of pills or cutting my throat just as the rescue crew arrives. I don't think I could bear that. You might think my colleagues were the cowards for taking the easy way out, but in truth, I'm the real coward. I can't. I can't. I can't even muster up the courage to do that. Now, I'm alone here. I disposed of the last of the three bodies out of the airlock

and cleaned up the blood as best I could. It took a long time, but I don't exactly have anything better to do. I sit in the captain's old chair as I record this, looking out the window. I can see too many stars to count, and distant planets that sparkle against the blackness like sapphires. You'd be surprised by how much blackness there is in space. Despite how many stars there are, they are almost immeasurably far from me and from each other. There's so much darkness between me and them. An almost infinite void separating me from the nearest celestial body.

I feel like it's about to swallow me whole. It's so vast that my mind struggles to comprehend it. To know that there is an even more incomprehensible void beyond my home galaxy threatens to fracture what is left of my mind. Before this voyage, space made me feel a sense of wonder, but now I feel microscopically small, like an ant peering up at the world's tallest skyscraper. There's a computer next to me, running a program to decipher the signal Earth received that sent us on this ill-fated voyage. It's whirring and clicking are the only

sounds in the entire ship. It is maddening. Being alone here, mixed with the oppressive quiet of the ship and the vast expanse of nothingness outside, makes me feel like a python is squeezing my entire body. I need to get out of here. I can't call for help, and I don't even know. if anyone knows where I am. The malfunction might have taken out our locator as well,

and if it did, I'm screwed. No one will ever be able to find me, not even by accident. This ship, this steel prison, will become my tomb. Either I'll use up all the food and water, which will take a few years since it was meant for a crew of seven, or I'll crack and finally kill myself. I don't even know why I'm recording this. Maybe it's the only thing keeping me sane,

or maybe I need the sound of my own voice to break the silence. Third entry. I don't think I'm alone anymore. Last night, I heard something thump against the hull of the ship. I ignored it, thinking it was a stray asteroid bumping against the side of the vessel. But this morning, I heard skittering in the vents. Whatever it was that was making the noise sounded somewhat large,

but I haven't seen anything yet. Maybe I'm finally going crazy. It's a miracle I've held on to my sanity for this long. considering what happened to everyone else. I've heard the sound periodically throughout the day, and each time I do, my skin begins to crawl, and the hair on my arm stands straight up. I need to get out of here.

If there is something in here with me, then I'm in grave danger. Something got in, and I don't want to find it. out what it is. If not, then I must be insane. I'm not sure which one is worse. I just heard it again.

It's getting louder, as if whatever is making the noise is becoming impatient and moving around more quickly. Or maybe it's just trying to scare me. If so, it's working. I just want out of here. I don't know how much more of this I can take. The quiet was bad enough, but the sound of that thing skittering around in there is so much worse.

I picture something with big, bugged-out eyes and too many legs running along its long, scaly body. I hope I never have to find out whether or not I'm right. Fourth entry. I think I saw its shadow last night. I had awoken from a nightmare and saw movement in the hall through a gap between my door and the floor. There's a day-night cycle program that dims the lights in the hallways and non-essential areas,

making it difficult to be sure. But the movement was accompanied by a scratching sound at my door. It sounded like something was trying to get in and lasted for at least a solid hour. I wanted to confront the thing to finally see what's been tormenting me with its presence. But as I said, I'm a coward. I pulled my bed sheets up to my throat

like a scared child as I soaked them with so much sweat you might have thought I wet the bed out of fear. Who knows? Maybe I did. As I lay there trembling and unable to move a muscle, I waited for it to stop toying with me and finally come inside. But it didn't. Eventually, the sound stopped. Maybe it didn't see the panel that held the button to open the door.

Or maybe it didn't understand how it worked. The other possibility, the one that fills my stomach with dread, is that it wanted me to know it was there. As you can imagine, I haven't slept since. The computer just chimed to tell me it has finally deciphered the signal. The decoded message has appeared on the screen. The message is only two words, and it fills. me with fear that sits in my gut like clumps of wet sand.

Stay away. Fifth entry. I saw it. Just for a moment. But I know what I saw. It looked like a giant insect, with pincers dripping with saliva, and had small, beady red eyes. It had claws like a crab's and six long legs protected by a tough-looking exoskeleton. As soon as it saw me, it chased me down the hall into the flight deck where I managed to shut the door on it.

It's still throwing itself against the door. With every loud bang, the door threatens to give way. It's persistent. And it will probably get me in the door. the end. If someone were to find this ship and listen to this, I have one thing to say, run. Get as far away from this godforsaken vessel and this sector and never look back. We don't need to know who sent that signal and what this thing is. It is not what worth it. It's going to kill me and anyone else it might find. And I have an awful suspicion that it's not

the only one of its kind. We reviewed the security tapes. For the most part, it was, as Dr. Schaefer said, we saw the double suicide, the murders, and the captain's suicide, as well as Dr. Schaefer's disposing of the corpses. What we didn't see, however, is any indication of the creature he described. This would lead us to conclude that Dr. Schaefer had lost his mind like the rest of the crew. But one fact gives us pause. We didn't find his body. The last log was created only 48 hours before we found the wisdom's edge, and we searched the vessel from top to bottom. We triple-checked the security footage to see if we had missed him throwing himself out of the airlock, but we didn't see anything of the sort.

Officially, he's been declared missing. But I know better. After conducting a thorough investigation, a new mission was established to determine what might have killed Dr. Schaefer, despite my numerous protests. I have a feeling those aboard will never come home. 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

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