Creepy - The House on the Cliff & Title Subject to Change

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

The House on the Cliff***Written by: Nancy Schumann and Narrated by: Megan McDuffee***Title Subject to Change***Written by: Susan L. Lin and Narrated by: Heather Thomas***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.

No. This is creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepy pastors 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. The House on the Cliff.

Written by Nancy Schumann and narrated by Megan McDuffie. It never used to scare me. The drop at the side of the house has always been there. The house hasn't moved. It hasn't changed. The cliff has always been as steep as this, always right outside the house. And yet, looking out of the window is like, looking into the abyss now. At some point, it stopped being a view that's exciting and unusual

because nobody else lives in a house right on top of a cliff. I don't see the valley below now. I see an emptiness that's staring back at me. The nothing has become a thing, and that thing scares me. I don't know when it started. I don't know what caused it. The house has been on top of the cliff for as long as anybody can remember. Nobody knows who built it. Only that it was a long time ago. There must have been records at some point, but there was a fire in 1887 that destroyed the town archives. That fire we know all about.

All the records since are carefully guarded and by now digitized, backed up and accessible for anybody who cares to investigate the history of the place. The house is older than that. The unknown builder and first owner of this house can't have had any family alive in this area, even at the time of the fire, because nobody ever re-recorded the story of the house on the cliff. It's a mystery why anybody thought to build a house this close to the edge. The walls of the house merge into the rock of the cliff seamlessly,

as if the house had grown out of it. The structure is sound. That has been established and checked again and again. They wouldn't have let people live in the house otherwise. My grandparents bought it when they got married. My mother was born here. I wasn't. I was born in a sterile hospital, but all my life I've lived in the house on the cliff. I'm its only resident now. My grandparents are long dead, and my mother lives in a care home.

It just got too much for her fragile body. She'd only live on the ground floor of the house because of the steps, and never left the house because of the rugged, narrow path along the cliff. It's better at the home for her now. She can go out and meet friends. I visit, of course. I haven't told her that the abyss in front of the house has started to scare me. I haven't told anybody.

They'd think I'm scared of living alone in the house, but that's not it. The house doesn't scare me. The house is safe. There's something outside the house in the deep valley the cliff overlooks. It's not the trees I can look down on. It's not the rocks beneath the house. I know all the sounds of the wildlife, the wind of the night. That isn't what scares me.

In fact, the wildlife is scared, too. I can tell by the seagulls that swarm around the house like birds of prey. They don't do this, normally. Seagulls don't swarm, and they've never come this close to the house. In the blood-red sky, they look like an attacking horde, but they are not the danger. It's as if the house has become a homing beacon. They must feel like I do.

The house is the safe thing here now. They keep coming back, and I never know if they're trying to warn me or scare me when they do. Their cries mix with the howling of the wind, as it lashes the walls of the house, trying to get in, trying to break the safety of my house. I try to ignore the bird cries,

like screams that surrogens. around me. I try to calm myself. To breathe steadily. I tell myself not to panic. Breathe in, breathe out, and again. Nothing's there. Nothing can harm you. You are safe inside the house you've always known. There's nothing to be scared of. My eyes scan my surroundings, familiar as they've always been. I know the door is locked and secure. I know the windows are closed. I know the quickest escape route if I ever need it. I know each room and the heaviest object in it, the one I could use as a weapon if ever I had to defend myself in my home.

I know all of this. I'm prepared for any emergency that could happen to me here, and yet I know that something is not as it's always been. Something moves, just about detectable out of the corner of my eye. I don't want to look. I blink. The shadow remains where I know it cannot be. The large window behind me faces the cliff. It faces nothing else. Birds can fly by, but they don't linger mid-flight. Maybe the wind carries something light away, but the wind is even quicker than any of the birds. There can be nothing

there that wouldn't come and go in a moment. The shadow remains. I turn. My heart stops. I try to tell my to breathe. I try to blink. I scream. The shadow doesn't move. It stands in the middle of the window. It can't be standing. It cannot anything. There is nothing but the wind and a sheer drop outside that window and the shadowy figure of a cloaked man that cannot be. My heart is racing. However much I blink the figure does not go away. I notice the details of the cloak, which looks like it's made of feathers. A bird man hovers outside my window. If he is a bird, he must be a bird of prey. Nothing about this figure looks harmless. Now that I've looked, I cannot turn away again. I wonder vaguely if the shadow is nothing but my fear personified, a combination of the bird cries

and the shapeless fear I've struggled with. The shadow smiles at me. It's not a friendly smile. It is pure menace. I want to back away, fly away like a wild bird that won't sit still for anybody to look at it. Yet I know the window is between us. I'm inside my house. I am safe here. I am. Am I not?

The shadow figure's smile widens. Can he read my thoughts? What does the shadow know that I don't? Then I feel it. I want to go outside. The house is safe. I know. I am scared of something out there that I'm hiding from in here. But while every fiber of my body fights to hide away, I cannot silence the urge to go outside. I tell myself not to move. I tell myself that looking at the shadow is better than whatever waits outside. One heartbeat, two heartbeats. My feet move without my mind being aware of it. Step by step, I back away from the wind. staring at the shadow. The door behind me is open. It leads me out of the room straight into the corridor that leads outside. My eyes are fixed on the shadow until I'm at the door to the house. I wonder what looking away will do and as I turn, open the door. I face the path that leads from the house off the cliff. For a moment, all looks normal. Then my eyes notice a spot of color.

that shouldn't be there, just on the paving stones outside the house. I look closer. The stones are covered in prints of hands and feet, small hands and feet. They're blood red and blue. These were not here before. The stones were clean and normal and unnoticeable the last time I walked to this path. There are no children in the vicinity. If any had come to the house to cover the pavement in handprints, I'd have hurt them. I could have seen them if I'd looked out in this direction. But there are footprints too. Footprints that lead nowhere. All the prints are in just one small area. There is nothing. No other prints, no paint spots anywhere else. I look around and don't know what to do next. I hear a sniggering laugh that I attribute to the shadow. It falls on the

prints of hands and feet in front of me. I can't look away. I can't look up. Somewhere at the back of my head, a voice shouts that it's only a shadow, only some kids playing, nothing to be afraid of. I take another step, closer looking at the handprints in the shadow. The laughter changes. This isn't the shadow. This isn't just one voice. It's several small voices laughing. The shadow engulfs me and the ground opens up. Where a moment ago I saw colorful handprints I now see and feel small hands all around

me dragging me into the pavement. It goes dark as if the earth that just opened up had closed over my head. The hands are still there grabbing me from all sides. I hear small voices laugh, small feet patter

in the distance. I struggle to breathe. It never was the house, I think. It's the cliff. The cliff is pulling me in. After years of being a solid base for somebody's home, it's drawing breath, a living thing. Why me? I wonder. A hollow voice I cannot see replies, the tribute is due. I try to look around myself, but it remains dark. The hands stop grabbing me. Somehow that makes me more scared. With the side, Silence, the faceless dread I felt in the house returns.

The cliff has always been alive. All this time that we lived and felt safe here, it was waiting for a time when it would be due a tribute. How can I be a tribute? The hollow voice returns. You are the youngest. The small prince of hands and feet pop into my head then. Oh, dear goodness, no, there were children.

They were the tributes before. or me. I hear laughter, malicious laughter, and there's enough light for the shadow to be visible. It smiles as it did when I saw it in front of my window. Without moving its lips, it says, You may as well know that you're only the 11th, probably the oldest young one we've had. All these children, they must have been so frightened. Didn't they have anybody to protect them? I mean, I am alone, but children would have parents. Nobody really missed them. There used to be more young ones, the voice says.

So it did read my thoughts earlier. What are we all tributes for? Now the laugh is so loud, the rock around me vibrates. The house. Those words are the last thing I hear before the rock closes in on me. The house on the cliff is much larger than it looked at first sight. It seems to have grown right out of the cliff, yet it's not a cave. It's a large, modern house with many interestingly shaped rooms.

Some look like something designed many years ago, as if the rooms were transported here intact from another building in a long-ago era. There is even that one room that looks as if it was just added, as if it didn't previously belong to the house. Creepy presents. Title subject to change. Written by Susan L. Lynn and narrated by Heather Thomas. People seem to believe that simply because words are published in a book,

that must mean they speak the truth. The man said after answering the front door of a little house at the corner of Heliotrope Street, I had only rung the bell to ask for a cup of sugar, so I hardly thought his response was appropriate. Maybe so. I offered without commitment, looking over his shoulder as if I might actually find a cup of sugar sitting around in plain view.

The man moved aside, but still didn't acknowledge me. I had just taken a step inside when he spoke again. Are we simply flipping the pages of these books day after day, searching for answers to life's most puzzling questions? questions we already know don't have answers. This latest musing did not appear to be a real query, so I was unsure whether to respond. Instead, I gave a curt nod,

not quite meeting his eyes as my own roamed around the house in vain, searching for any sign of sugar, or at the very least a kitchen, where I could possibly find some. All I saw was a short wooden table in the dark hallway, a few spools of colorful waxed thread arranged in a pyramid formation at the center. There was something unsettling about this house. Before I could concentrate long enough to figure out what it was,

the man's low, monotone voice rose once more. People also seemed to believe, that simply because antique appliances are depicted on a book's cover, that must mean the story inside takes place in an era other than their own. While he stated this apparently random observation, his hand reached for a doorknob to the right and opened the frosted glass door to a very peculiar dimly lit room.

Stacks and stacks of books spanned half the length of the room, overshadowing the wine-colored carpet. Some were bound tightly together with twine, dividing individual volumes into groups. Others just sat there, free to move, but frozen in place. As I bent down to retrieve one of the untethered books, the man stiffened visibly behind me, and for the first time, I turned completely around to give him a closer inspection. There was something unsettling about the man as well, but unlike his house, it was easy to realize what.

Firstly, he looked out of place, out of time, as if he'd gotten out of bed this morning and found himself in the wrong decade. Secondly, he was dressed in very muted colors, his hair dark gray, his skin pale. He wore no discernible expression on his face, which was unusually symmetrical, except for a monocle he held in place over his left eye. If someone changes a word in a book, he did not write. Does he disrupt the universe?

The man contemplated aloud, now pushing the book into my hands. I enjoyed reading this one, I did, he insisted, continuing without a trace of emotion. Change something, anything. The cover? A page, a word. Or maybe even only a letter. With that, he began ushering me out of the room, waving his arms this way and that,

but in the general direction of the door. I stepped out but noticed the man didn't follow. He seemed stuck on the other side of the threshold. He seemed to be having trouble exiting. From my new vantage point, I took one last look around the room. From the now menacing towers of books to a vintage scrabble game that looked to be abandoned on a writing desk against the opposite wall, my eyes finally lingering on the empty oval frame, hanging above them.

After leaving the strange man's house, I returned to my own home on the other side of Heliotrope Street, where the first and last letters of the original word street had been spray painted over long ago. The vandalized street sign had never been replaced, despite complaints from many of the residents. A mess of mixing bowls and fallen flour and various plastic measuring spoons greeted me as I entered the kitchen.

My hands heavy with an unfamiliar book, rather than a cup of sugar. A new package of spiraled candles lay ready at the corner of the table, the matchbook right next to them. But my birthday cake would have to wait. I headed to the living room, still carrying the book, which seemed to weigh even more than it had before. The blinds were down.

I pulled them up, dust scattering. The book was on the coffee table, still unopened. For a second, I wasn't sure how to approach it. I saw the cover clearly for the first time as I stared at it. The entire surface had been obscured by the fervent scribble of a correction pen, as if the cover were an old canvas painting being prepped for something new. I could see imperfections in the textured veneer. I could also see my hands suddenly, faint white smudges on my fingertips.

The book was still wet. I couldn't remember it being that way when I left the man's house. An even otter feeling enveloped me then. I was acutely aware of the dust particles surrounding me, rabid in the light. A rectangle moved ever so slightly up the wall. Everything else stock still. This is ridiculous, I told myself.

It's just a book. I walked over to the armchair directly across from the table, sat down. I could see with absolute clarity now that the opaque white fluid used to mask the cover had completely dried. A rough-hewn rendering of an old-fashioned sewing machine had been drawn over it. I ran my fingers lightly over the surface.

This time my hands came back clean. All media had been fixed, a train whistle in the distance. I barely noticed it in the moment. I picked up the book and tilted it to the side, trying to read the spine, which had not been painted over. It was a deep maroon, void of any lettering. I ran my fingers down that, too, as if words would magically appear at my touch. Of course they didn't. I didn't know what I'd been expecting.

I tossed the book back on the table where it landed heads up with a dull thud, like a ball that needed air. From my position in the armchair, I regarded it with trepidation. With a sudden thought that I couldn't remember, how to open a book. There was a drawing on the cover. No title, it seemed. This was disconcerting.

Books were supposed to have titles. I stopped to think about this. Yeah, they were. I was pretty sure. The living room had darkened. The rectangle of light had continued climbing the wall. A sun was setting outside. The sun.

We only had one of those, as far as I knew. My cake was still in the kitchen. Actually, I remembered. I hadn't made it yet. No sugar. It's getting late, I thought. What am I doing? My eyes scanned the room.

Oh yeah, the book. The book was lying on the table, hadn't moved from where it had been a moment, a minute, an hour, earlier. My eyes focused on it. There was no title that I could see. I wasn't sure how much time had passed. I wasn't sure how to open the book, how to begin reading it. I was fairly sure I had thought all this already. Then the book was in my hands.

I thought I heard another train whistle, but I suspected at this point that maybe I was imagining things. Out of nowhere, the fumes hit me as I gingerly pulled back the front cover. a throbbing headache imminent. I didn't know why I hadn't noticed the smell before. The book was old, very old. The pages were yellowing, tearing at the edges, more or less falling apart. The binding is loose.

I counted five blank pages at the beginning of the book. There was no title page, no table of contents either. By that point, I was relieved to discover that Chapter 1, started on the first page of text, clearly labeled in italicized caps. I wondered for a moment why that discovery filled me with such reassurance. But I didn't dwell on it for long. The book was starting. I read the first sentence out loud.

People seemed to believe that simply because words are published in a book, that must mean they speak the truth. The man said after answering the front door of a little house at the corner of Heliotrope Street. Unease filled me with every new word my eyes encountered. That had just happened to me. Hadn't it? Why was something that had just happened to me

printed in a book that looked decades old? I forced myself to continue reading down that page before moving on to the next. I stepped out but noticed the man didn't follow. He seemed stuck on the other side of the threshold. He seemed to be having trouble, exiting. What was it the man had said to me? Change something.

I felt a sudden compulsion to follow his advice and fished under the seat cushions for my pen. My hand shook slightly as I pressed the ballpoint to the page, adding an S in the middle of the last word I'd read aloud. A mark made not entirely of my own volition. It wasn't that I believed my actions could literally alter the real world. But I had never defaced the pages of a book before. Rather, I had always treated them like sacred objects, appalled at people who wrote notes in the margins or dog-eared

their favorite pages. My own books were all brand new, some still shrink-wrapped, arranged alphabetically on a shelf along my bedroom wall. To be honest, I hadn't read most of them. Maybe that odd man was right. change something, a cover, a page, a word, maybe even only a letter. He'd forgotten to add, maybe even a life. I closed the book, uncapped my own correction pen, and wrote in a title, subject to change. The book felt lighter in my hands as I walked back across the street in the morning. Again, I rang the doorbell, peering unsuccessfully through the warped glass window.

Nobody answered, and I couldn't see a thing. When I tried the knob, the door pushed open without much effort. I just wanted to return your book! I called out, still standing on the welcome mat, which I now noticed had been mutilated at some point and was missing its left half. It now read simply, Come, there was no answer.

I stepped inside quickly, observing again how dark the whole house was in contrast to the bright daylight outdoors. Pushing open the side door I had entered the day before, I clutched the book to my chest. The room appeared to have shifted in the night. Not in any immediately obvious way, but even so, I sense that every object inside

occupied a slightly different space than it had previously. that the books in the stacks had shuffled in place since I last saw them, that the game board on the desk had been pulled closer to the edge, the scattered letter tiles rearranged into a novel configuration, feeling somewhat disoriented. I reluctantly returned my book to one of the stacks. As I did, my eyes finally rose to the oval frame above the table. I could have sworn it had been empty the day before,

Now it held a painting of a man, captured straight on from the top of his head to just below his chest. There was something oddly unsettling about the image of the man. Firstly, he looked out of place, out of time, as if the painting had traveled here this morning from an earlier decade. Secondly, he had been painted in very muted colors, his hair, dark gray, his skin pale. He wore no expression on his face, which was unusually symmetrical, except for a monocle that had been rendered with delicate brushstrokes over his left eye. 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 you. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons Sherrillite licensing or with written consent from the authors.

No portion of this podcast may be rebroadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the creepy podcast production team and the stories author.