Creepy - When Dusk Falls on Hadley Township

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

A quiet little township...***Written by T.W. Grim***Content warning: animal cruelty***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3SrH_3fsROXFAjomKcUtw***Music by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Creepy is proud to be a part of the bloody disgusting podcast network. This podcast has made possible thanks to our patrons. So please join me in welcoming and thanking patrons. Stuff Brawl. Elias Alvarez Garcia. Sanders. Dylan James Grabowski. Rosie Hips.

Brooklyn Leona Stephens. And Sean Hurleyhee. The 31 days of horror are over and our October promotion is officially closed. The magnets for new members will start to be sent out this week. But that doesn't mean the wrong. rewards have ended. Our patrons mean everything to us, and we do all we can to give back for their generosity. The reward tiers start at just $1 a month, giving not only the personal shout-out on the podcast, but also early commercial-free access on all of our full productions. From here, the

reward tiers include our most popular level, $5 a month, which give people four bonus narrations every single week and immediate access to all past Patreon-exclusive episodes, well over 400 by now. Beyond that, we also have levels that include coffee mugs, t-shirts, and even logo hoodies. If you're in a place to support the podcast and would like to learn more, please check out our reward tiers at patreon.com slash creepypod. Now, 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 not simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents When Dusk Falls on Hadley Township. Written by T.W. Grimm. Sunset over Hadley Township is almost always picture perfect, no matter what time of year it is. It's doubtful that anyone would disagree with that statement,

not if they ever witnessed the event firsthand. However, most people in these parts would argue that the sunset is the most stunning in summertime. In mid-July, Headley Township is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and when the pink-laced gold of the early evening sky begins to deepen into the dark crimson shades of dark, it could be mistaken. for the Garden of Eden. Soon enough, all the lawns will begin to sizzle and die beneath the oppressive glare of the

August sun. But for now, the grass is green, and the meadows are dense and lush with the bounty of summer. Aside from its natural beauty, Hadley is basically a desolate patch of wilderness, a rural municipality with a total population of just under 2,000 souls. It's a place without tourist attractions or major urban towns. centers, mostly comprised of forest, farmland, and towering blue sky. There are a few scattered hamlets within its borders, but most of them are basically just a collection of houses surrounding a wide spot in the road.

They might boast a gas station, a variety store, or maybe even a small bank, but never all three. Hadley Township is said to be blessed, and after taking in the spectacular sunset, it would be hard to disagree with that statement. A blessing, however, can sometimes also be a curse. On this particular evening, Roger Mosley is out cutting the grass on his riding lawnmower, a never-ending task when one lives on a farm. He notices that the shadows are starting to lengthen and realizes that it's high time to collect quits on the mowing for the evening. He parks the mower in the barn and takes a wander around the barnyard to live.

look for his daughter. Even though it's still relatively early in the evening, it's time for her to get inside. Normally, he let her stay out late enough to go chasing after the fireflies, but not tonight. Tonight, everyone has to be inside before dusk. Roger has lived on this farm his entire life, and he's grateful for his quiet, honest existence. The farm is successful and has always turned to The modest prosperity of the land stretches back for ten generations. Family roots run deep in Hadley Township. Most of the farmers still plow the same fields that their ancestors cleared with an axe over 200 years ago. And Roger was no different.

He was born a Hadley man, and he would die a Hadley man. Roger finds Sadie and Rufus at the edge of the cornfield, chasing after butterfly. eyes in the slanting sun rays. Identical grins plastered on their faces. Both girl and dog have been stained green by the fresh-cut grass. He brings him up to the house and sends him inside for Katie to deal with, answering her annoyance with a meek little shrug. She kneels down to give them both a mock scolding at eye-level, her hands planted firmly

on her generous hips, and a smile threatening to break out and spread across her face. Sadie and Rufus look down at the carpet and shuffle their feet, enduring Katie's lecture with pouting defiance. I'll be in soon, he says. Gernava Smoke. Katie gives her husband a small nod over the top of Sadie's sweaty, tosseled hair, a look passed between them. Don't be too long, she tells him softly. Tonight's the night. Roger takes a walk around the house, frowning at the uneven lawn, and lighting a hand-rolled cigarette with a match.

He notes that the cut looks pretty ragged. The more blades must be getting dull. He stands in his front yard and watches as the western half of the sky begins to glow with a gentle golden hue, their bright blue slowly giving way to shades of amber and rose. He looks up at the sky for a long, long time, motionless and tense. and his roly gradually burns into a forgotten tower of ashes between his fingers. We leave Roger Mosley standing in his front yard and travel west down County Road 22, chasing after the sunset.

We pass endless acres of rustling cornfields, all of them standing well over eight feet in height. The soil and Hadley township is renowned throughout the county as being uncommonly rich and fertile. If a Hadley man were to sell his farmstead to an outsider would fetch a pretty penny above market value. But it's unlikely that will ever happen. There hasn't been a sale of land within township lines in well over 200 years. The landscape is dominated by the surnames Mosley, Vendoren, Borden, and Weir. They are emblazoned onto mailboxes and road signs all across the township, as well as appearing in the names of public schools, bridges,

nature reserves, and a dozen different little hamlets. Even garbage dumps and transfer stations bear the mark of the four original families, the oldest bloodlines in the municipality. The entire historical patchwork of Hadley Township is threaded together with these names, and there's hardly a single acre that hasn't been owned by one of these families during the span of the past two centuries. Interwoven family trees and their equally complicated claims on the land have turned Hadley into a very close-knit corner of the world,

which is exactly how they want it. The people here take care of their own. Outsiders are tolerated, but they are never truly welcomed. Hadley is a place of uncommon beauty, but it is also a place of secrets. The mess of cornfields come to an end at the corner of County Road 22 in Weir Lane. From there, there is a three-mile stretch of land

on either side of the 22 that has been divided into a number of large private lots. The majority of these lots are occupied by homeowners, but a few small businesses can be found in the mix. Mom and Pop operations that are run by local residents. Not everyone in Hadley is a farmer. There's a small but thriving business community here as well, enterprises that vary from pet groomers and candle makers to car mechanics and machine shops. all of them are at least modestly successful. Here we meet Brian Caldwell, the owner and proprietor of a small supply warehouse for landscaping materials,

a one-man operation with a decidedly unimaginative name Caldwell Landscaping Supply. Although it is currently the height of landscaping season, Brian called all of his suppliers earlier in the day and cancelled his pending orders. He then flipped the sign in the door from open to closed, turned off the lights, and sat down on the floor in the middle of his showroom. He is still sitting there now, slumped over the gloom as the sun lowers in the sky, and the shadows stretch their skeletal arms to the east. Brian Caldwell has gone insane, which is not an unusual occurrence in Hadley Township. In fact, it happens all the same. time. People around these parts have their secrets, it's true, but there are a number of people

in the township who are unaware of its old traditions, Brian being one of them. His father had known of them all too well, but Rick Caldwell had always taken great care to shield his sons from certain facts regarding the true nature of their little corner of the world. Even still Hadley is one of those places where an uncomfortable sort of psychic residue seems to linger in the air. It rasps away at the back of the mind, a low and unpleasant itching of the subconscious that makes people extra irritable during the long, hot days of August and downright mean when the temperatures plummet in the month of January. Unfortunately, some people are naturally more sensitive to this low-key mental assault than others, and Brian Caldwell is unlucky

enough to be such an individual. Over the course of the past few weeks, Brian has become convinced that the moon is actually the staring eye of an ancient beast, an evil presence that dwells in the howling void which exists somewhere just beyond the reaches of outer space. Brian believes that the beast watches our world every night with its jealous eye, hungering for our destruction. His delusion began as a nagging little notion in the back of his mind, a soft, insistent, whisper, but a quickly inflated into an all-encompassing paranoia that occupies Brian's every waking thought, every single minute of the day. Nobody knows about Brian's increasingly volatile mental state or the nature of his delusion.

At first, he refrained from telling anyone because he was afraid people would think he was crazy. But as his strange new conviction sank its poisonous hooks deeper into his mind, Brian began to fear that his friends and customers might actually be servants of the evil eye. Agents who spy on him and report their observations back to their nocturnal master when the sun goes down. Brian decided that it was imperative to hide his newfound awareness from the people around him. He became quiet and watchable, glaring out at the world through bloodshot eyes, squinted

and bleary under the weight of his constant suspicion. Brian has been awake for almost a hundred hours. Sleep is an impossible feat. Recently, the eye developed the ability to see right through the roof of his house, and at night he can actually feel the thing's loathsome gaze crawling across his trembling body, coveting his very existence. Don brings temporary relief, but the eye is always lurking just beyond the horizon, waiting for the heavens to grow cold and black in the wake of the waning sun,

waiting for its chance to arise and stare hatefully into Brian's soul. And Caldwell became a time bomb waiting to go off, and this morning the inevitable explosion finally came. As he sat at the kitchen table staring blankly at the sunlight that was streaming through the east windows, Brian suddenly realized that his own wife was actually an agent of the beast, and so was his teenage daughter. The revelation hit him like a ton of bricks, and he led out a keening, whistling little gasp. His pallid face crumbling with grief and rage. All along it had been his own fucking wife and kid.

For Christ's sake, his own flesh and blood. Did you just say something, hon? Without looking up from the dishes. And Brian stared at her back. His fist clenched on the table on either side of his coffee mug. He tore his eyes away from the treacherous demon bitch and gazed back into the depths of the hazy morning sunbeams. His eyes narrowed into slits. Of course they were serving the eye.

They had always served the eye. How had he been blind to this fact for so long? From the table and crept in behind Emmy as he stood at the sink. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a rictus of hate. He took out his folding buckknife, Emmie's head in the counter, and stepped carefully over her body, trying his best to be stealthy and quiet. He tiptoed upstairs and pounced on Mary Beth as she was engaged in some last-minute fussing with her. her eyebrows in the bathroom mirror, rushing to get ready in time for school.

Mary Beth fought him like the demon she really was, screeching and clawing. He managed to fend off her father's initial attack and bolted past him, running down the hallway with her hair streaming behind her and blood blooming like roses on the back of her shirt. Brian scrambled after her. His eyes bulging and his face criss-crossed with deep oozing scratches. He was simultaneously grinning, crying, and snarling like a rabbit dog. Did you think I'd never find out?

Did you? Tackled his daughter at the top of the staircase and pinned her to the floor of the hallway. He pushed the side of her head into the carpet and she wailed. No, Daddy, please. Please don't hurt me. He ignored the monster's trickery and plunged his knife into her neck. sinking it right up to the hilt. The blade pushed between two of Mary Beth's cervical vertebrae and severed her spinal cord.

She abruptly stopped thrashing beneath him, and he finished the job in relative peace, sawing through her throat with no more emotion than if he bent slicing into a particularly tough cut of rare steak, gruesome work. But that was how it had to be done. Brian knew this to be true because a sunbeam had told him so, in the kitchen. It spoke to him in the patterns it made as the dancing motes of dust in the air. The arrangements of the shapes projected onto the linoleum as it shone through the east windows.

Sunlight is golden. Sunlight is salvation. Brian knew this to be the truth. The whole thing was kind of a big relief, really. After long weeks of fear and confusion, it was finally all crystal clear. He'd been right all along. The darkness belongs to the eye of the beast and sunbeams never tell lies. We leave Brian sitting there on the cold concrete floor of his showroom with his arms

wrapped around his knees and continue on with our journey. The sun is almost touching the horizon now and the heavens above have been painted with broad strokes of red and gold. We backtracked rear lane and head north. It isn't long before an old church appears up on the right-hand side of the road, tucked cozily between a field of soybeans and a field of corn.

It's a non-denominational house of worship that goes by the name the Church of Welcoming Dawn, which is where Pastor Jonathan Bording can be found on most Sunday mornings and on Wednesday evenings. The night he hosts a weekly Alcoholics Anonymous, meeting. Pastor John is currently sitting at his desk in the small office at the back of the church, reading through a passage in the good book and scribbling down notes in a binder full of lined paper. The Bible he is studying is unusual in appearance. It is a large, imposing tome that weighs almost 10 pounds, bounded in faded leather and likely printed by means of a wooden printing press. This Bible has been in use at the church for more than two weeks.

hundred years, and it has never been handled by anyone except the pastors of welcoming dawn. Local men who have dedicated their lives to administering to the spiritual needs of the citizens of Hadley Township. The Bible is written in an alphabet that predates Latin by almost 3,000 years, a language long dead to the rest of the world. Pastor John began his instruction on how to decipher the strange-looking runes when he was still a boy. tutored after school every day by dour old Pastor Will, the man who had preceded him as head of the church. Pastor Will taught young Jonathan how to divine the deeper meaning behind the passages written in the good book and showed him how he could relay God's word to the rest of the congregation with his sermons.

The most important lesson imparted on young John during these formative years, however, was to always obey the word of the Lord. always without question or hesitation pastor will would often say the Lord has generously blessed our little community with fertility and good fortune he's a kind and loving God but he can also be an unforgiving God never forget that Jonathan never Pastor Will stressed to him on a nearly daily basis that it is the duty of mankind to praise him to satisfy his demands in the manner that has been laid out in detail in the good book. He darkly warned that woe will soon befall those who turn their backs on the will of their

Lord, woe and suffering beyond imagining. Pastor John is currently struggling to write a sermon for his next service. The theme of the sermon is highly ironic to him. Deliverance He studies on the subject of deliverance. quite often, although not in the manner you might expect. John Borden yearns for a personal deliverance from the grave responsibilities, and even graver consequences, of his life as the head of the church.

Sitting there at his desk with the fading light streaming in through the west window, Jonathan closes his eyes and tries to imagine what life would be like if he had been born completely free and unbeholding to anything or anyone, free to wander. free to think or feel in any manner he might choose from one hour to the next. He scrubs his hands across his face and blinks down at his notes. He imagined setting the paper and the binder on the fire, then using them as a torch to spread the blaze across the entire damnable church. He smiles to himself, a bitter twist of his lips.

He wouldn't dare do such a thing, not ever. He is trapped by virtue of his bloodline. There will be no deliverance, not for Pastor John. He will serve the church until the end of his days. The alternative is too awful for him to even contemplate. The Lord who watches over a headly township is unforgiving. His will must be obeyed. We still have one more stop to make before nightfall,

so we will leave the church and continue. north on Weir Lane until we reached a large patch of old growth forest, a wild and rambling area that the locals refer to as Mosley Woods. We hang a right onto Blackmore Road, a glorified gravel lumber road that is in decidedly poor condition. Most heavily residents avoid it like the plague, claiming it's far too bedeviled by deep potholes and soft crumbling shoulders to be safe for travel. Taking your vehicle onto Blackmore Road is a great way to break.

bust a tie rod or bitch up your alignment if you aren't careful. Although it's true that the road isn't worth a dam, it's not really the potholes that people wish to avoid. It's mostly woods. It is thick and vast and forbidden. People have been known to get lost in there. People have been known to disappear in there entirely. We follow Blackmoors meandering north-westerly path through the woods.

It's already getting dark down here at ground level. But high above our heads the treetops glow like ripe summer wheat in the fading daylight. Dusk is almost upon us. There's a dirt path coming up on the left peeking out from between a birch tree and a tangle of wild raspberries. You could easily miss it if you didn't know where to look. The path isn't much wider than a single vehicle and it's in even worse shaped in Blackmore Road, heavily rutted from years of ice, floodwaters, and erosion. We follow it into the woods and discover that the rough little path is actually someone's driveway.

That someone is Kurt Weir, an elderly recluse with a sour and unpleasant disposition. Kurt has just awoken from his afternoon drunk and is feeling a bit under the weather, but there's no time to piss and moan about his aching head. He has work to do. Kurt is 74 years old, a gangly scarecrow of a man who is blind in one eye and mostly death on the same side. He suffered these injuries back in the fall of 87, the result of standing a tad too close to a leaky moonshine still that decided to explode. Old Kurt still lives in the same dilapidated shanty that he built almost half a century ago, a tar paper shack with rusty aluminum siding nailed to the roof. He is the proud owner of several old Chevy trucks, all of which are decaying on cement blocks

in the dirt patch that serves as his front yard. He is also something of a scrap metal enthusiast who hoards large quantities of rusty iron rebar, steel beams, crates full of brass doorknobs, and other such metallic detritus. His property is a safety hazard of jagged metal and random piles of rubble. Kurt has lived in seclusion in this remote little shanty for so long, most of the younger generations don't even know that he exists. The old-timers, those were still sharp enough to remember that far back, could tell you that old Kurt has purchased the seven-acre woodlot from Roger mostly senior

for a song back in 67. Just a few scant months after his young wife tragically died in a car accident. Nancy Weir had lost control of her vehicle early on the same. a Sunday morning and hit a telephone pole out on the 22, not more than three miles from the Hadley-Alban border. Nancy had been doing at least 60 miles an hour when her Oldsmobile careened off the road and smashed into the pole. She was given a closed casket funeral. What the old-timers won't tell you is that there had been a short police investigation following Nancy's death. A number of injuries the coroner found in Nancy's body were inconsistent to what

what would be expected from a fatal car accident. There were also questions regarding the state of the Oldsmobile's brake lines. Kurt Weir was soon paid a visit by a detective from the Burton County Homicide Unit, a stone-faced Irishman named Sean O'Connell. Kurt's answers to O'Connell's veiled accusations were sparse and well rehearsed. Frustrated by his inability to sweat a confession out of his suspect, The detective tried questioning where his closest neighbors. His inquiries were met with a brick wall of sullen, hostile silence.

Unable to build a solid case, O'Connell was eventually pressured into throwing in the towel. Nancy's death was ruled an accident. Despite the county's official stance on the matter, Detective O'Connell never actually stopped working on the case. Nancy Weir had been murdered and was likely dead before she was. was placed behind the wheel of the Oldsmobile. She'd been torn apart, ripped and mutilated by a curved instrument with a sharp point. O'Connell believed that the murder weapon was a meat hook. There was no doubt in his mind that if he'd been able to obtain a search warrant,

he would have found such an instrument hidden somewhere in the farmhouse the weirs have been renting from Gilbert Van Doren, Kurt's uncle, through marriage. At first, the detective assumed that Kurt's motive, was the insurance payout, but after a while he began to suspect that Nancy's murder was a part of some greater, even more sinister conspiracy. He'd seen it in the eyes of the people he'd attempted to interview. They all had the blank closed-off stare of someone who had grown accustomed to guarding a dangerous secret.

O'Connell did some digging around and discovered that the reeve of Hadley Township had personally paid a retaining fee to secure the services of high. shot trial lawyer from the city. Why would the rive of the township hire a lawyer for a man who hadn't been officially charged of a crime, let alone the likes of Kurt Weir? He was white trash, an alcoholic chronically unemployed ne'er-do-well. It seemed highly unlikely that a man like that would have friends in such high places. It was also doubtful that foggy-headed Kirk could have orchestrated the accident on his own.

Someone helped him do it. But who? And for God's sake, why? Detective O'Connell kept searching for the answers to these questions for five long years, right up until the day he died of a massive heart attack at the police station. His colleagues found him sitting upright at his desk, his eyes bulging from their sockets in his mouth open to let out a scream. A copy of the previous year's census for Hadley Township was,

clutched in one of his hands. There was an open notebook in front of him, and he'd scrawled the words, connected by blood, on the page so hard that the paper had torn beneath the tip of his pen. Kurt trudges out back to feed the livestock, a few sheep and goats that he keeps in a dilapidated pen behind his shack. He used to keep a few hens and a rooster too, back when he still yags. These days, Kurt sustains himself mostly with the diet of meal replacement drinks, oatmeal, and whiskey, and the coop stands empty.

The livestock are not from meat or milk. They serve a higher purpose. Kurt watches the snarfling, jostling beasts as they feed and randomly picks out one of the nannies. The number of the beasts that he must put out into dust comes to him in his dreams. several nights beforehand. Tonight, it will be a single goat. The billy goat has been granted a perpetual exemption from the process.

Kurt has developed a sort of grudging affection for the mean little bastard. He doesn't have the heart to put him out into the dusk. He decided a while ago that he'll just let the fall-tempered creature isle the rest of his days away in the pen, eating oats and kicking the living hell out of any creature that dares to venture too close. The billy's demeanor reminds Kurt himself, to the point where the old man has affectionately christened him, Kurt Jr. Kurt Jr. is the first animal that Kurt has bothered to name in a good long while. The ranks of the livestock change too often to care much about who is who. Jimmy Van Dorn's half-wit son, Dougie comes bumping down Blackmore Road and his father's cattle

truck every month or so, bringing out new animals as needed. Kurt makes sure he always has at least three goats and as many sheep on hand at all times. He knows through personal experience that it's very bad to be caught short. Very bad indeed. There are repercussions. But we are as the seventh son of a man who was himself a seventh son, the lineage going back over ten generations. He has the dreams, and he brings the animals into the woods to suffer their fate.

This is Kurt's inherited duty. and it is cost them dearly. The livestock are extremely skittish of leaving the safety of their pen. They refuse to approach the gate unless lured by some unfamiliar and exotic-looking treat. Kurt rips a clump of dandelions

from the hard-packed soil in the yard and coaxes the nanny goat by waving them around and crooning. Come over here and get the pretty little yellow things, goat. Tasty pretty little yellow things. Come on now. The nanny cautious. creeps in a little closer and Kurt swings open the gait.

He bears a scant collection of caramel corn teeth and what's meant to be a disarming smile and makes kissy noises at her. Dandelions in one hand and a rope nodded into a noose in the other. That's it. Come on out and get them pretty yo things. That's a good girl. Falks at crossing the threshold. She lowers her head and bleats, tensing to flee at her feet.

if the old man tries to grab her. Kurt starts pretending to eat the dandelions, smacking his lips and exclaiming just how damned good they are, until the goat's curiosity finally outweighs her fear, and she delicately tiptoes out of the pen. The little goat stretches her neck out to chomp down and the bobbing dandelion heads as Kurt throws a noose around it. Snapping it tight with a practice flick of his wrist. The goat lets out of garbled sounding shrieked and tries to back away, but Kurt Yanks the

penned creature off her head, pins her to the ground beneath his rubber boot, and strangles her with a noose. He asphyxied the poor creature until her struggles weaken and taper off into a few random twitches of her back legs, then eases the tension on the rope. It simply wouldn't do to bring out an animal that was unconscious or dying. They have to be both alive and aware when the sun slips past the horizon. These are the rules, and to deliberately break the rules was unthinkable. Kirk gives the goat a few minutes to recover, whistling tunelessly and staring off into space

as he waits. When it seems as though the gasping little nanny will be strong enough to stand on her own, he hauls her upright and begins to lead her into the woods. whistling his tombless song. You can pick out enough of the melody to recognize that the song is Last Kiss by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, the song that Kurt and Nancy had, their first dance to at their wedding. It was supposed to be Blue Moon, but the elderly gent who was hired to spin the records that

night accidentally put on the wrong record. He was more of a Guy Lombardo sort of man and didn't really know the difference. Kurt and Nancy laughed it off and swayed around together in the basement of the Legion and Paul's Mills, smiling for the cameras as their guests hooted and clapped and banging their fists on fold-out tables. Happy with the positive reaction it got. The old fella spun the little 45 over and over again that night. Kurt's pretty young wife grew more enchanting in his eyes each time it was played. Kurt brings the goat to the sacred knoll,

a journey that seems to get longer and longer with each successive full moon. He ties her to a post that has been sunken deep into the top of a little hill and leaves her there, leading mournfully after him in the gathering darkness. When he was a younger man, Kurt used to feel a certain kind of sadness for the animals he left behind for the Lord. Nowadays he feels nothing for them at all. All the bad feelings are reserved solely for himself and the faded memories of his lost love was taken from him by the good lord on a foggy, rainy night in 1967. The Lord is unforgiving.

The Lord is vengeful. Kurt knows this to be true from personal experience. He is the seventh son of the seventh son, and his task is a grim one. but the repercussions of failing in this task are far, far worse. Kurt trudges back to his leaning little shack, still whistling his sad little tune. We leave him to his bottle and his inner demons. The sun has slipped below the horizon. Dusk has fallen on a headly township, and the moon now dominates the night's sky overhead, full and bloated.

It really does resemble an evil eye. a dead, milky eye that glares down on our world with cold, hateful glee. All across Hadley Township, people have locked themselves in their houses and pulled their curtains shut. They retired to bed early and restlessly wait for sleep to come, yearning for the welcoming dawn that will drive away the dreaded darkness that shrouds the fragile shell of their existence. The goat bleats and cries in the distance. An hour passes by, then another, and then there's the sound of powerful wings beating the air overhead.

A stench of brimstone and corruption assails our nostrils. The goat begins to cry out with renewed vigor, fighting to escape the noose around its knack, strangling itself in a state of terrified panic. When it is momentarily blotted out by a long serpentine shape, There's a split-second impression of gigantic bat wings and gaping jaws, and then the goat begins to scream. The screams abruptly stop. The flapping wings disturb the stillness of the night once more, and then all is silent. Though of the Lord has been satisfied, the people of Hadley Township will live to welcome the dawn once again.

including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, or to suggest stories for future episodes, please visit us. At CreepyPod on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. CreepyPod. All stories told on this podcast can be found at creepypasta Wikia.com and are protected by a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved unless otherwise stated.