Creepy - The Biting

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Who will remember you?***Written by: Oli White***Bonus Episode: "The Eastern Inn Death Elevator" written by: Michael Hart and narrated by: JV Hampton-VanSant***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***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.

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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 The Biting Written by Ollie White I was there the first time it happened The first time we know about anyway

Corpses go undiscovered all the time Harold Simmons might not abandon the progenitor But records say he is So he is I was there We were hanging out at the mall Barely a mall really in our small town. Me and some high school buddies, junior year, bravado and hormones running high.

On the lookout for some of the girls from our class we wanted to persuade to come to the movies that night. It felt so important at the time. And I remember it was such clarity. But these things, teenage heartache, homework, all the bullshit, really. Just bullshit. Unimportant. Those years. Best of our lives. Maybe for others. Who cares? I was there. I saw it. All of it. Because I was a teenage boy and I was curious and with my friends and we were all dumb bastards who lacked empathy.

Things have changed so much for me. It feels like a lifetime ago. It was just under a year. Harold Simmons was just standing there near the food court. We noticed them because a few others had already gathered, an impromptu circle gathered around him, but not too close. Like everyone had subconsciously agreed it was best to keep our distance. We looked where they were looking.

A few couples, a lone older woman, a group of freshmen from our school, and saw him. The man we'd come to learn later was called Harold. He stood there. Just stalk still. He had no bags or anything. He was in his sweater and slacks. Nothing weird. But he had his mouth open.

Real wide. When I say wide, I mean, as wide as a human mouth can go. It wasn't anything unnatural. It wasn't some scene from a horror movie where someone's face distorts. He just had his mouth open wide. We were fascinated by it. It was the funniest shit we ever saw. My friend Craig was the first one to whip out his phone and snap a photo.

Dary to get a selfie with him? Rather, friend Ralph said. By this point, we've been watching Harold Simmons for five minutes, maybe closer to ten. He hadn't moved, hadn't changed, just had his mouth open wide. Craig wouldn't approach because nobody else had approached. But a larger crowd had gathered now. I haven't spotted them all security guard, just there, watching. His sister, Meryl Dyer.

was in our class. She was one of the girls we were hoping to pick up that night. Then those very girls showed up. They joined the circle across from us. Normally we would have rushed over. Anything else forgotten at the sight of short skirts and cleavage. But like a collective hive mind. We all just nodded and raised our hands in greeting.

and then all of us continue to stare at Harold Simmons. I don't know why we were so obsessed with watching this guy. I don't know why, seemingly nobody entertained the idea that he might be mentally ill, might need some help. It very quickly became accepted that it was some kind of side effect of the thing. The thing that happened later. there was a fly buzzing around Harold Simmons. He didn't reach up to swat at it.

Didn't react at all. He kept flitting in front of his face. A ripple of murmured laughter went through the crowd. Shit, dude. What if it goes in his mouth? Roth giggled. It did. It flew into his mouth.

Harold Simmons didn't react. didn't flinch, didn't even swallow. The crowd watched silently as this huge blue bottle alighted on Harold Simmons' tongue. Walked around there for a moment, then flew out of his mouth, away off into the mall and out of our collective sight. I wish we'd all taken that fly's cue. Of course, the crowd went wild at this, but in a hushed and reserved way. Like, nobody wanted to disturb the scene too much. Didn't want to risk alerting Harold Simmons to what was going on to ruin the fun.

We watched him just standing there with his mouth open wide for another 20 minutes. People joined the crowd, but to my knowledge, not one person left. Toddlers sat in strollers, their eyes fixed on the man. totally calm and patient. A little boy had been riding on his dad's shoulders. They'd been there when we joined the group. We were still there at the end. The kid's still sitting on his dad.

Nearly an hour, standing still with a child pressing down on your spine. That's partly how you know, looking back, that this wasn't our faults. This wasn't natural, mostly. But some of it was. That same part of our brains it makes us stare at car crashes or look at shock sites online. But this was just a guy with his mouth open wide.

When Harold Simmons began to move, nobody pointed it out. But a collective realization passed through the crowd. Attention. An expectation. that all of us felt. When we discussed it after, at our first and only trauma support group, we all mentioned this.

All of us. Harold Simmons wasn't moving much. In fact, he was doing exactly what you would expect him to do. He was closing his mouth. It felt like he did it in slow motion. Time lapse. This moment felt like it lasted as long as he was. the entire time we'd been watching.

But the facts, the CCTV, the witness statements, the large clock above the central atrium of the mall, tell us it took no more than five seconds. Harold Simmons was closing his mouth. Only it soon became clear that wasn't exactly it. His upper lip rose to reveal perfectly normal teeth. His lower lip curved. inward as its jaw lifted. For a moment, just a moment.

But it felt like a perfectly captured frame. Because at the time, it felt so funny to me. So preposterous. Harold Simmons' mouth was positioned like when someone's trying to gently bite their bottom lip that looks seductive. And Harold Simmons closed his mouth. and continued closing his mouth. And continued.

Blood began to spill from between his lips. Small rivulets from the corners of his mouth at first that soon became a torrent as he bit through the flesh of his lower lip. His chin. This sounded teeth clacking together. A soft flapping sound as the flesh inside his mouth parted from the flesh beneath. A momentarily clear image of his teeth clenched tight together, visible through ragged and torn tissue. Then he tilted his head down a little and opened his mouth again.

Not too wide this time. Just enough for the bottom lip he'd bitten off to fall out and plop to the floor. If you want to know the size of what he'd bitten off, then just try pulling your bottom lip over your bottom teeth as far. far as you can. Rest your upper teeth against it and imagine biting down. It was that size. Actually, don't do that. Don't risk it. Nobody should risk it. But if you're curious, that's how you'd find out. Then Harold Simmons surveyed the crowd. Uh, look a mild surprise on his face, as if he was puzzled to realize we were there.

The blood gushing from his mouth, the ragged wound on his face, it didn't seem to bother him. He just seemed a little surprised at our presence. Almost as if he couldn't understand why we were all wasting our time standing around there. Then the crowd parted without a word. And Harold Simmons casually walked off in the direction of the mall exit. And then it was four hours later. When we all came too, we were still just sitting there. The crowd had gotten even bigger by this point.

Some of them hadn't even seen Harold Simmons. It'd just been caught up in whatever had caught us. Someone called the police. The following events were so complicated and convoluted that they'd take far too long to explain. It all seemed so important back then. This one singular, horrifying incident there was interviewing, police questioning, the aforementioned trauma counseling group, which, as it turned out, only needed to meet once, because things got much, much worse after that.

But before that, Harold Simmons deserves to be eulogized. On record, he's the progenitor after all. He was just a guy, just a regular guy. He had an ex-wife with whom things were amicable and a 12-year-old daughter who he saw regularly and had a good relationship with. He was a chartered accountant at a small firm in town. He collected jazz records and played golf on Thursday evenings. He was entirely, completely unremarkable. And I mean that.

in the most respectful way possible. He just happened to be the first. Nobody knows why. So, how did they identify Harold Simmons? Nobody present at the mall had been able to identify him, which turned out to be strange, because it later transpired that a number of onlookers were familiar with him. One even worked with him.

But when we were interviewed, none of us had any idea who he was. All we could describe was his basic appearance, and of course what he did. That part we could describe in minute detail. So the thing is, the identity of the man who bit his own bottom lip-off wasn't discovered for nearly two weeks.

There was even suspicion that it was a mass delusion. Gas had somehow gotten into the mall vent, insult sorts of bullshit. And the CCTV, well, imagine them all with plenty of cameras. And imagine they cover pretty much the entire area.

Apart from three square foot of floor, right by the food court, you can imagine exactly where Harold Simmons was standing. Thankfully, the CCTV was at least able to capture him walking away. except of course it did show a man walking away. And of course it didn't show his face.

But it did show the blood trail, the same blood trail the cops had found when they arrived. Of course, his DNA wasn't on record, so they couldn't identify him that way. Why would it be? Just completely unremarkable. I heard they tried identifying him through the teeth marks on the part of his face he bit off.

Maybe they would have, if he hadn't been found. Thirteen weeks and 18 hours after me and my buddies had first decided to gawk at Harold Simmons. His body was discovered. We live in a fairly rural town. There's a nearby forest. It's quite thick, and it can be treacherous in places. Nothing too severe, but it's big enough.

and dense enough that it's entirely possible for nobody to pass through certain parts of it for a while. Thirteen days and 18 hours, for example. A group of kids looking to party found them. Some guys and gals graduated when I was in sophomore year. Some had stuck around. Others were back for the summer. I guess while they were in high school, they'd had this place in the woods where they used to go and drink, get high, screw around. Same things I've been looking forward to doing when I hit senior year. As if you somehow just automatically got to do these things in your final year. So these guys, they decided to go back there.

Like a kind of reunion for old times' sake. Couldn't explain why they made the decision. They hadn't even given the place a thought in a couple of years. It was like this case. sort of fashioned by tree roots over a solid mound of earth I don't know exactly I never went there but they did they found Harold Simmons they'd heard about the scene at the mall obviously who in town hadn't so they suspected he was that guy as soon as they saw him his bottom lip had been bitten off

Here's what I know, or think I know, from a combination of rumors in the press. And remember, the death of Harold Simmons feels like a lifetime ago. So much has happened since then, but I was there. I saw what he did. And for me, personally, I don't want him to become just a statistic. Harold Simmons was found in the hole under the tree, in the dry, dusty dirt. all cracked and solid. Fissured veins ran through the earth where the heat of that summer had turned the makeshift cave into an oven.

Brittle twigs littered the floor. Beetles scurried to and fro over roots that desperately dug into the ground. In this hole, nature thirsted, yet still remained parched. The tree that formed the cave was dying, and in solidarity, Harold Simmons had sought it out. He sat cross-legged on the ground. His head was bowed, as if he was in prayer. By the time he was found, his blood had long since stopped flowing.

A rusty stains on the earth revealed that he'd let himself bleed out where he sat. The autopsy revealed a few things. It revealed that Harold Simmons had not allowed the wound on his bottom lip to heal. He'd bitten at it over and over, presumably to keep the blood flowing. It revealed that there were no other wounds on Harold Simmons' body. He died of a combination of blood loss, dehydration, and starvation. And it revealed that Harold Simmons had died on August 26th. Eleven days after he'd walked out the front door of the mall.

Why had no one reported him missing? How did a man with a career, a daughter, and an ex-wife managed to bite his own lip off, walk out of the mall, walk into the forest, sit down under a tree and die slowly over the course of 11 days? Of course, these were questions that needed answering. And I'm sure they were going to be asked. Except then, the day after Harold Simmons' body was found, a small group of people reported losing time after witnessing an unidentified woman bite through her bottom lip in the local library. Jacqueline Maldonado was found more quickly than Harold Simmons. For her, it took five days.

She was discovered in the attic of the library itself, of which she'd been a patron and where she'd mutilated herself. She was discovered by a guy who himself was simply visiting the library to check out a book. The attic hadn't been accessed in decades. The guy had no reason to go up there. When asked, he told the police that he'd simply been compelled to do so. And it seemed so normal to him that he just went with it. The next day, the largest group Yat reported having the same experience in the town park

during an open-air concert by a local band. Midway through the performance, the band's rhythm guitarist had stopped playing, dropped his guitar, and opened his mouth. You can imagine the rest. This one helped. The authorities were able to identify the missing man, Kruger Fine. But this time, a whole new sense of unease was added. Nobody in the audience remembered the band even having a rhythm guitarist.

Nobody in the band remembered having a rhythm guitarist. All the witnesses could remember was that a man was on stage, and he did what he did. It was pieced together from the guitar just lying there. Then the numerous photos of the band showing four members. Not three. That's when further truth came out. Leaked the press by someone at the police precinct. Nobody had reported Harold Simmons missing because nobody who'd known him had remembered him.

And then, at the exact moment his body had been found and identified thanks to the wallet he had on him, numerous calls came into the station from police who suddenly recalled that their friend, colleague, former lover, been absent from their lives for the last two weeks. the same thing had happened with Jacqueline Maldonado. If it hadn't been for the groups of people always being present at the events and the inexplicable discoveries of the bodies, then their lives and deaths may have gone forever unremembered,

almost as if it was important that people bore witness. Then it leaked that Jacqueline Maldonado had been one of the spectators at the mall on the day Harold's imminent that accident happened. and that Kruger Fine had been president at the library when Jacqueline Waldenado had bitten down. Don't jump to conclusions, the police said. But we all knew. The library group had been small.

However, the group at the concert had been large. A sizable portion of the populace of our small town. The search went underway for Kruger Fine's body. He wasn't discovered by anyone actively involved in the search. He's found deep in the basement at the local middle school by the local veterinarian, who had no explanation why he'd broken into the basement of the middle school. When Tim Andrews, a Marine, bit his bottom lip off, he'd been doing laps at the local pool. He climbed out and stood on the side.

The crowd who had been in trance this time had been in the pool. Despite the time loss and the trance, nobody drowned. CCTV, which again conveniently managed to avoid showing the identity of the biter, revealed that the members of the crowd who had been in the pool at the time of the incident had all tread water on the spot for nearly four hours. Another odd incident about the Tim Andrews case. This time, police were hoping to be able to identify him by discovering who'd left their clothes and belongings behind in the changing rooms.

No. After biting his bottom lip off and while everyone else was entranced, Tim Andrews had returned to the changing rooms, dressed, gathered his things, and left. This time the entranced crowd was spread throughout the public pool. Whoever had presumably been in Andrew's proximity in the changing room had also experienced a loss of time and memory. So now we knew. simply seeing the victim at any point between the biting and the discovery of their body would lead to some form of memory loss. He got people asking,

Were there others? Had it happened in places where only one or two bystanders have been present? This didn't add up. All the witnesses of the biting itself had at least remembered having witnessed the incident. But the witnesses in the pool changing room, they simply had no memory of seeing him at all. Like their brains wouldn't allow them to comprehend his existence. Eleven days later, Tim Andrews was discovered in the crawl space under an empty suburban home, which had been up for sale for six months.

He'd been discovered by an arthritic octogenarian woman who told officers that crawling under a property across town from the nursing home in which he lived had felt like the most natural and important thing to do. The next day, a crowd witnessed what they could only recall as a teenage girl doing what we'd come to call, the biting. Took five weeks before Merrill Dyer's body was found. Merle Dyer, from our class. One of the girls we've been trying to take on a date that night. One of the girls who'd stood opposite from us as we watched Harold Simmons become biters.

zero. Meryl hadn't been present at any of the other bitings, so the transmission wasn't sequential. Meryl had been found in a dilapidated barn on a farm that had gone out of business in the 80s, and had never been taken over. Once again, the victim had picked a deeply lonely place to die. The crowd who witnessed Meryl's death was the last set of onlookers to be drawn into, an hour's long staring contest with hell itself. Nobody else was enticed to watch as a victim stood there, with their mouth open, before biting down and severing their flesh. You might think that means it ended there.

We did. For a few weeks, it seemed like it was over. How were we to know that all we'd experienced was the beginning? A body was found. then another and another all in lonely places but no longer discovered

by people who felt compelled to seek them out all the discoveries made some kind of sense and with each discovery maybe one or two people would come forward to say that they remembered having seen someone bite their bottom lip off

unlike the previous witnesses like myself these people only remembered after their victim's body was found. Likewise, the victim's loved ones continued to forget them until they were discovered. Then a body was found, and another, and another.

And it soon became clear that whatever was causing this, whatever horrifying force that kicked these events into gear, had simply wanted us to bear witness to a spectacle. to spread this disease, contagion, whatever it was. And that had been achieved. So now it was free to take victims whenever it wanted, wherever it wanted. And nobody would even notice. This was worse in so, so many ways.

Personally, I've remembered eight people who've disappeared from my life, the men discovered deceased. Both Roth and Craig were taken. My world history teacher, our male man, a chick I used to go jogging with sometimes. Our elderly neighbor across the street. The guy who ran the corner store nearby. That was the weirdest one.

He ran the place alone. When his body was discovered, piles of money were found on the counter at the store. People had simply been coming in, gathering their items, and believing they were paying for them. I myself have a memory of going in, buying a soda, and leaving the change on the counter. But until his body was found, I recalled nothing weird about the transaction. And then I lost my mom. Suddenly being hit with the memory that my mother, who I lived with,

had been absent from my life for the past fortnight was the most doomed, cursed feeling I've ever experienced. One so horrific that I can't even begin to describe it, recalling out of the blue that your mother had been missing. Then having to wait for the call to confirm her body's been found? I wouldn't wish that on anyone. The whole town has tried to seek help, but nobody ever comes. We've sent messages, phone calls, emails.

It was like people who aren't from here simply couldn't see what we're saying. It was like they were replying to something else entirely. That was back when they did at least reply. Now any correspondence we send outside the town of any kind just goes ignored. It's like the world is forgotten about us. Of course, people tried to leave, even though it could risk. spreading whatever this is, some tried. And now there's a rough circle around our town populated by corpses of people who suddenly stood still, bitten themselves, then sat down to die.

It's like leaving town triggers the disease. We call it a disease when we talk about it, but we all know what it really is. A curse. Some people tried mouthguards. They were useless. They'd simply remove them once they began their trance. I haven't heard of a couple people who plan to smash their teeth out simply to avoid being able to bite down.

The curse would take them before they had the chance. It's like making any concrete decision to do something that will prevent the sequence of events from playing out as a premature trigger. Now most of us are resigned awaiting things out until our time comes. We find more bodies in the loneliest place. places every day. Population dwindles. The number of lonely places grows.

I don't know why this is happening to us. What causes us to bite through our bottom lips, then go somewhere to bleed out into the earth? I'm sure there's an explanation. Some kind of backstory that explains it all, makes all the symbolism clear. But everyone's too afraid to investigate to find out. Nobody wants to risk triggering their own biting, and I'm sure you've already thought of it.

We did too. But what about people with dentures? Couldn't they simply remove them and be protected? There weren't many of them in town, or a small place, after all. So it took some time to find them. Remember they existed when we did. For the smallest moments We were all glad that we have teeth

That all we're forced to do is bite Those people with dentures They ripped out their own tongues I get by as best I can What else is there to do There's no way of getting help There's nothing we can do to stop this torture this punishment for crimes we can't even identify,

the way to even understand it. So together we just live out our increasingly lonely existences. Every now and then another body's found. Every now and then I have a sudden memory of having seen someone bite through their lip and walk away. I've lost track of who they all are. Only Harold Simmons really sticks with me. Because I was there. The first time it happened.

I was there. I forgot about him once. I intend never to forget him again. And I wonder, when my time comes, whether there will be anyone left to forget about me. For your bonus episode, Creepy Presents, the Eastern Inn Death Elevator. Written by Michael Hart, and narrated by J.V. Hempton Van Sant.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of messed up stuff working at the Eastern Inn. But most of it is the usual messed up stuff. Dad's cuffing their little kids on the sides of their heads, domestic disputes, sex workers, hardcore drunks, junkies screaming at invisible horrors, hotel parties that turn into brawls, that kind of thing. Just what you'd expect. Another messed up thing is a lot of guys thinking that,

since it's getting to be close to midnight and I'm a woman working the front desk at a flop house, that I'm just waiting for them to chat me up or proposition me. Or you get the idea, use your imagination, whatever you think of. I've probably had a guy say it to me. And this messed up thing, having to look Asians in the face when they check in, after they've taken in the 70-year-old fiberglass bamboo moldings and velvet paintings that make up the decor of this place. A couple years back, some of the hotel stationery type stuff still had the... best oriental hotel on Route 17 on it.

I was very relieved when all of that finally ran out. Here's the thing. Eastern Inn stories are all messed up, all depressing stuff, and all stuff that grinds you down over time. But I know those. Those messed up things are not what you're asking for. And I know this has been an obtusely literal answer to your question. So, yeah, don't get all distracted on me.

Put your phone back away, and I'll tell you about the elevator. Well, I'll tell you the most messed up thing that happened to me while working here. and it involves the elevator. I'd only been working here for a few months. I was coming out of my last bad breakup. I've had some difficulties with long-term relationships, I guess. When I applied to work here, and I used that phrase loosely, I was kind of living here.

And then rent was part of. of my pay for a while. Jack, that's my boss, he's a good guy. Part of the job was being available for Eastern In-Death Hotel storytelling and related questioning. I had kind of a gothy look back then, goth adjacent at least. You know, skirts, fishnets, coal liner. I think that's part of the reason Jack hired me,

other than him being a good guy who saw someone down and out. So, yeah, I'd been working here for a few months, like I said, telling the stories, if asked about it, showing morbid Schadenfreude types, no offense, behind the curtain. Even playing up my spooky look a little bit, if I felt like it on a given night, And the first night of my experience happened like this. I was sitting here at the front counter.

Look, you can see the remnants of a koi pond mural if you look at the edges of the counter, just like on the floor of the elevator. And this perfect square of koi pond is perfectly preserved because there was a little black-and-white TV set from the 1950s sitting on it, until they stopped analog broadcasting in the States. I was watching TV that night, a broadcast of Blind Date on Fox.

They used to do this whole reality dating block late night back then, two episodes of Blind Date, one of the Fifth Wheel, and then some cops or court crap shows. Not a bad way to spend a night of work. So, yeah, it was a weeknight. Things had been slow, and I was still drinking back then, so I had a couple of crackers,

you know, many bottles of 99 bananas tucked in my purse under the counter, and a little basket of them in my room, mini-fridge ready to go. I was in one of those rare, alcoholic, rosy moments, the kind you chase as a full-time drinker. And I think this is important. My life was kind of shit right then,

at least on paper. And who knows what kind of long-term damage I've done to myself over the years but I wasn't despairing when I first heard the voice. I was feeling lightheaded, enjoying the TV and the artificial banana flavor and the simplicity of basically watching a tiny TV set and drinking for a living. My bed and shower were right down the hall. So I was doing my thing, happy in my own way, when, friends,

From right down the hall, I heard a little voice sing, sign. Have you ever heard that old ace of bass song, The Sign? I don't mean that I heard the whole song, just that word. Just two or three trilly notes stretched across one syllable. But I recognized it. My sister Amanda had that song on a cassette tape. I don't know if it was a single, or if someone had dubbed it for her,

or if she'd taped it off the radio, but she used to listen to that song over and over. I turned the TV down and pushed my purse a little bit further under the counter. I looked around to see if someone was, watching me. I listened. I could hear a couple of TVs, cars on the interstate, that distinct hum a soda vending machine makes.

No singing, though. I looked back at the quieted TV. That dude, you're getting a Dell guy, you probably don't remember him. He was capering around in one of his commercials. I heard it again. Not the getting Adele catchphrase, the singing. It was from down the hall. Something about it.

Easy to understand what something now, but anyway, something about it wrecked my good drink mood and drew my attention. I crept down the east wing hallway. I heard the singing again. You guessed it. It was coming. from the elevator. It was a little girl's voice.

That same greasy sheet that's hanging in front of it now was hanging in front of it then, except it was a little less greasy back then. I heard the singing again, right as I approached it, and I whipped the sheet back and peered inside. I screamed. Now, I didn't see fresh blood splattered on the walls or a bloody, mangy rabbit stuffy,

like other folks say they've seen. The Andersons in 2009. Sold their story to the Discovery Channel? You saw the one. Their son finds a stuffed rabbit under the bed. Parents find him sitting within. in the elevator, blood everywhere. I know they called the cops.

I was working that night. Me? I didn't see any blood. Or, our most recent Google review? The wife saw a little girl in the elevator and had some Vision Quest nightmare thing, and now their own kid cries every night and is afraid of plushies.

I mean, I am literally empathetic, but what were they thinking? Bringing a kid to a horror con here. One star? You got what you wanted. I'm boring you. My night, the elevator was empty, except for the cracked bamboo rotting off the walls and the pink and purple unicorn nightlight on the floor. A nightlight, just like a little girl, might have dropped.

Pop culture tells us that everyday folks find little girls scary, I guess. Half of us, give or take, used to be little girls. But still, my ex-boyfriend, he was getting his Ph.D., and he would give you a Marxist, feminist, or post-structural exegesis on scary little girls. I've been out of college a little longer. My need to share research has cooled. And anyway, I don't want to bore you with too much of my own cultural analysis, so I won't. but I will tell you why seeing that little nightlight gave me such a start.

And it's not because I find little girls scary. My sister Amanda had the same nightlight all through her life. And then when we found out she was sick, like definitely going to die sick, Mom and Dad decided we were going to Walt Disney World. Amanda brought the nightlight with her. She used it at both hotels we stayed in on the drive down, and she used it at both hotels we stayed in on our drive home. She was 13. Too old for a nightlight.

Too old for Disney World, really. not that we'd ever gone before to know that, and she was way too young to die. And the whole thing was just this tragedy. The whole trip, I mean, you can imagine. The faces mom and dad made, the fake joviality from all of us, her night sweats and day sweats and vomiting,

it was exactly how you think it was. I'll leave it at that. A tragedy of a trip. And her passing, obviously. Also a tragedy. Later that year, just like the doctors predicted. I'm not making light of it. it. It's just delving into my trauma in more detail than that isn't relevant. And I don't feel like reliving it

any more than I already have to every night. But yeah, anyway, I'd seen that particular nightlight before was very familiar with that particular nightlight. And there I was holding it again after finding it on the floor of the famous Eastern In-death elevator. I screamed, so of course a guy in a Buffalo Bills cap rushed out of his room. You know the type. The kind of guy you imagine just stays up late hoping to hear a woman screaming. You okay, miss? You need help, miss? I had a hard time getting him back in his room.

Hard enough of a time that most of the fear had gone out of me by the time I got him to leave me alone. I set the nightlight on the countertop and returned to my crackers and TV. Rationality had already set in. I had been drinking. I had heard someone singing an old pop song. the nightlight was mass-produced. The kind of weirdos that would go out of their way to stay in a hotel that a family had died in, just to visit the elevator that they all had died in.

No offense, but those kinds of weirdos tended to leave things like the nightlight behind sometimes. Still do. Though these days, I suspect the place. And plushies and perfume and lip gloss and what all are mostly abandoned props for video content. It's always little girl stuff too. A whole family to choose from. And everyone is here for the little girl ghost. I always knew some people had trouble falling asleep.

Not me. Not back then. I used to love falling asleep. The night just never held the same kind of archetypal fear for me that it seemed to for most. It's quiet. Everything's over. Now, in the afternoon, when the light goes sideways and everyone gets a caloric cast of their skin and lips, that's a time I sometimes use to panic. And mornings, with the weight of all of the past and the pregnant expectation of the day stretching out in front,

that's an even more common time for me to panic. You have to live with your morning mistakes, your morning memories, for the rest of the whole day. I still hate mornings as much as I ever did. So, yeah, nights and I used to get along just fine. But after I saw that nightlight, my nights went to shit. I have this, I'll call him, this imaginary friend. Have had him ever since I was little.

I'm not going to describe him. to you. It's personal. Just for brevity, I'll call him Ted. I see, converse, and hang out with Ted at night as I'm falling asleep from the time I first lay down through the twilight phase of consciousness. Sometimes he's in my dreams. The first night after I found the nightlight, Well, I was just fading out, warm and in my special safe place with Ted. When I heard, Sarah, that's my name if you didn't notice the tag. From outside my night place. Like Amanda was sitting in the room, saying my name.

I like falling asleep because of... of the places I visit on the inside, the person I hang out with on the inside. And this new noise was definitely on the outside. I opened my eyes. Of course, there was no one there. My mouth was a little dry, and I had a little bit of a headache as the liquor was faded. but whatever, I just closed my eyes and went back to what I'd been doing with Ted. I felt it get into bed with me.

It was little girl-sized, but heavy and hot. Have you ever held someone when they have a really bad fever? That's what it felt like. Just this sweaty, raw meat, slick body right next to mine. Uncanny, kind of, repulsive all the way. I tried to push it out of bed, but my hands hit only air. I got up and drank some water.

I'd had nightmares before, of course. And like I explained, I liked the night. and I'd had a whole young life of being reminded of my dead sister. I wasn't really all that concerned about it, is what I'm trying to say. Not at that point. So I closed my eyes and went back to my TED. Sarah, the sign. And the slick little body gets into bed with me again.

I push air and wake up. I try to sleep. Slick fever body next to me again. Okay, I get up, shake my hands, tell the air that everything is fine and that I'm fine as if someone is listening. I take a shower. The showers here are great.

You should try one before you go. They're still the old-fashioned ones without the spray limiters, and the hot water boiler is the size of a domestic pickup. I feel much better after my shower. I get into bed, go to TED, and I honestly am still expecting everything to go back to normal. But it doesn't. As soon as I have achieved the warm, safe feeling, the thing gets. gets back into bed with me.

I don't know how many times I repeat the cycle that first night. I know it was a lot of times. I even tried just ignoring it, just accepting it, but I could feel the heat radiating off the thing and smell the weird hamburger restaurant smell of it. If I opened my eyes, it all disappeared, no lingering smell, heat, or moisture. But if I was about to fall asleep, it came back, over and over again. I reacted how you probably expect.

I cried. I asked what it wanted. I wheedled. I pray to God for the first time since now I lay me down to sleep, that prayer I said when I was a little kid. I threw the nightlight out into the parking lot. I took a couple of Benadryl with one of my last crackers of 99. I didn't have a car to try to sleep in,

but I did go out to the lobby. Just as I was dozing off in one of those vinyl and pipe chairs, I felt the thing slide up against me, just lounging an empty space. Sarah? It said, until I opened my eyes. I didn't sleep that night or that morning, which was part of my sleep schedule back then. Or even in the afternoon. I'd stop trying by the afternoon. I did still have this idea that the next night would be different, though,

that it would be normal. I got through my shift. It wasn't the first time I'd had a full shift of work after no sleep. My stomach was a mess, and I didn't provide any of the customer service for a couple of folks who came in that evening. But I got through the shift. I really convinced myself that it was over

that the night before had just been a weird one-off. Some kind of reaction my body had to the drinking and all that. But as I was walking to my room at midnight, at the end of my shift, I heard Amanda singing the Ace of Bass Song inside the elevator. I knew it was going to be more of the same.

And it was. Here's the thing. I'd always assumed that people who suffered with insomnia were kind of exaggerating how bad it is. Not needing to sleep, just more hours in the day. day, right? But the reality is that you do still need to sleep. You just aren't. My stomach was a mess all the time. Simple math, simple processing tasks became almost impossible. My skin broke out.

I smelled bad no matter how much time I spent in the high-pressure showers. It was a good thing. Jack was in Florida. If he'd seen me, he'd assumed I'd picked up a hard drug problem, and that would have been too much even for someone as understanding as him. In case you're wondering, sometimes people ask, yes, my thoughts did wander to suicide. I considered using it as an out, considered it often those days. But, you know, I wondered if death would just be a more permanent permutation of that nighttime experience. In a savage inversion, wakefulness had become my new break. At the worst of it, I had this idea that maybe I could sleep at a nightclub.

I know, but think about it. The noise would drown out the singing and recitation of my name. The hot, writhing bodies all around would distract me from that one particular hot body. I was desperate. I hadn't had my head down on the table for very long. It felt like seconds before the bouncer had his hands on my shoulder yanking me up. I hadn't actually had anything to drink that day. My stomach had been in knots, and I just didn't feel like I could even handle it.

So I wasn't drunk or high or anything. But he didn't know that. Probably wouldn't have cared if he did. The thing is, though, that my plan had kind of worked. I felt like I'd been asleep. for a minute. I caused a scene. I pushed him off me, tried to push him away from me. He wrestled me, and I fought back hard, shoving, and scratching. If I'd been rational, I'd have known that no amount of fighting was going to get him to leave me to sleep on a table in the club. But I wasn't rational.

He eventually muscled me outside, and I still kept fighting him. I think I had this kind of idea that he wouldn't hit a girl, not in a real way, maybe. Or maybe I just imagined myself having that idea looking back at that night. I don't know. Maybe you're listening with a similar assumption about the, bouncers and young women. Let me disabuse you of that notion. The guy beat me up bad.

This scar right here is from one of his rings, I think. It's from that night anyway. After the parking lot, the next thing I felt was pain. Then a sensation of the small, hot, body next to me. Then I came all the way out of it. I was in a hospital. I looked around. I didn't see my purse or anything like that, and I figured I'd probably lost it in the fight, which meant that the hospital staff didn't know my name probably, which was great by me. So I pulled out the IV and got the hell out of there.

No insurance, you know? That was the worst night of it. My jaw still has a kind of clicking sound when I open it and close it, and I still have the scar, and sometimes I think one eye socket is a slightly different size than the other. But I got through it. Jack never found out. Not until a couple years later when I told him anyway. So, yeah, I didn't know what to do.

I never had much faith, really. When your child or sister dies, some people turn more into religion, and some people turn more away. We turned away. No priest to call, nothing like that. So I called Jack. I didn't know what else to do.

It was his building. He told me something. Kind of crazy puts the, uh... Wait, wait. Can I just... Let me see that. No, I'm going to hold on to it. Okay.

Now, here's a... something you don't know about that elevator. Jack invented the whole thing. This place hadn't been exactly turning massive profits ever since the new interstate got built and folks' taste and accommodation turned to the safely repetitive. Jack had a simple idea to turn this place into a destination for it. a certain kind of person. Make it haunted.

That elevator hasn't worked since the 1970s, just dead space. When it broke down, whoever owned the place probably saw that the Eastern Inn was halfway to a flop house already and figured with only two stories, that an elevator was kind of superfluous, what I always assumed he figured anyway. So, Jack buys the place, and he's turning a profit. Not by a boat profit, but enough. But enough is never enough, is it? And then Jack has his idea.

He logs into a parent. normal reporting for him. It's the early aughts, after all, and he pretends he's a maid here. He sets up the whole story, the elevator crashing down to the ground floor, the bamboo paneling lining the walls cracking and splitting, the bones of the family in town for the state fair, snapping in literary parallel to the bamboo paneling snapping, the bloods, on the elevator floor and on the little girl's rabbit plushy. I even have reason to believe, not that Jack would ever admit this, mind, but I believe that he looked the other way after a couple of underage parties happening here

so that he could sneak a rabbit plushy into the broken elevator or under a bed. You can't have a local legend without teenagers to spread it. He was the front desk clerk back then. I'm sure he had lots of opportunities to cede his story anyway. As he tells it, his plan did start to bring in some notoriety, both online and just word of mouth. Those were still different realms back then. And the occasional ghost hunter started booking rooms.

A little paranormal convention started booking here once a year, that kind of thing. I don't know how much traffic it drove, but it was enough that when I went asking for a job, Jack was already in the process of moving on from front desk clerk and moving into Florida lawn chair sitting. Or maybe the traffic got better on its own due to some other factor. Maybe you ghost types are not statistically relevant. Doesn't really matter, I guess. I know I did say I wouldn't recite too much theory at you, but allow me this brief digression. Hotels are liminal spaces.

Elevators are, too. So, the two together are exponentially liminal. People tend to fill up liminal spaces with their own interior stuff. Fears, lusts, whatever stuff they usually keep pressed way down inside. Now consider our death elevator. Maybe with so many people focusing on this particular liminal space being haunted, it became haunted. And of course, as I kind of stated, exterior hauntings are usually reflections of internal hauntings, right? So, if you are able to follow my sequence of logic, that is my theory.

Huh, that's easy. I didn't. Well, first off, it's not her, at least not in the way you might mean. And I didn't. I didn't get rid of her. I told you, all of you. All my scary Eastern Inn stories are messed up stuff, depressing stuff, and stuff that grinds you down over time.

Not stuff with neat endings. I did what people do when they experience tragedy. What people do when awful things happen. I eventually just accepted it. Got used to her, sort of. Not that I've had anyone over to spend the night in the last decade. The thing recites my name, sings me that fucking song, and gets into bed next to me every night. I'm going to give you some advice.

Go ahead and come. keep poking around in haunted spaces if you want to. I can't stop you. But just remember that you can still see things without believing in them, and that the Wonderland Mirror of the mind is never as far removed from the exterior world as you think it is. You spend enough time in these stories, in these spaces? And sooner or later, your own dead reflections will start stopping by your bedroom at night.

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