Full Body Chills - The Ornament

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

A story of curious questions, strung on a Christmas tree.Written by Nina Schmidt. You can read the original story and view the episode art at fullbodychillspodcast.com.Looking for more chills? Follow Full Body Chills on Instagram @fullbodychillspod. Full Body Chills is an audiochuck production. Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

This episode was produced with audio effects in full surround sound. For the best experience, we kindly recommend you listen with headphones. Ho, ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas! It's that time of year for jolly and cheer, for family and friends and another year's end for red and green silver and gold for gingerbread houses candies and snow for christmas trees and christmas sweaters and christmas music and more christmas and so on and so forth no No, Santa's not getting bored of Christmas,

but I thought maybe we should mix it up a little. Tradition, perdition, sometimes a little variety is good for the soul. You can't live on cookies and milk, believe me. December 26th is what I call the Porcelain Purge. Anyway, I figured if we're going to shake the pot, let's go all out. Let's ride this sleigh to the South Pole and turn Christmas into Halloween. Great idea, right? Now, I've had the elves down at the post office comb through my junk mail.

I mean fan mail for anything freaky, spooky, or otherwise kooky. I receive all manner of posts. Jury summons, solar panel ads, holiday newsletters. Ugh! Don't tell anyone, but I use them to stoke the fireplace. Yet aside from the riffraff and refuse, I also receive letters. No, these aren't Christmas lists. This mysterious mail is of the most singular and sometimes sinister form.

Their stories are confessions plucked from the consciousness of everyday folk. How do these come to me, you might ask? Well, I'm Saint Nick, and I always know who's naughty or nice. Some of these stories might be exaggerated, but I'll let you decide what's true or not. Don't worry, nothing here can harm you. Or maybe it can. Ho, ho, ho! I'm getting excited! So then, before the snow melts, let's crack one of these stocking shockers open, shall we?

Let's see here. Which one? Which one? Ah! Here we are! This letter comes from a young woman burdened with hardship and troubled by heartache. But now it is nearly Christmas, and so all of her worries are set aside. Yet like a fragile ornament, her peace and quiet hangs by a loose thread. So gather round and listen

close. For as long as I could remember, Uncle Ed's tree had been the physical manifestation of the word Christmas. I remembered my parents taking me to see the big tree in Union Square one year when I was little and being confused by the uniform, frankly, unornamental baubles adorning it. I tugged on my mom's sleeve and asked her why their tree was so boring. She explained to me that it wasn't that their tree was boring, but that Uncle Ed's tree was special. His tree was adorned with objects, random, inexplicable, and fascinating. A Hello Kitty keychain, a silver hair clip, a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses, a fake gold watch.

Uncle Ed would collect urban flotsam from his travels as a pharmaceutical rep, glue a piece of yarn to the top of it, and add to his collection of ornaments. As I'd gotten older, most of the magic had leaked out of the Christmas season, but Uncle Ed's tree had remained special. Every year, there were a couple of new ones, each stranger and more comical than the last. He would referee as the cousins combed the branches, trying to find every last new addition. Being the one to find a new ornament

was the closest I got nowadays to that kid-on-Christmas-morning feeling. And I really needed that feeling this year. The past few months had been one thing after another. First, my girlfriend had dumped me, saying I'd been distant and inattentive. Rather vague reasoning, in my opinion. But she'd seemed angry enough that I hadn't tried to plead my case. Then my typical A's had started slipping to B's and then landed with a thud at a C average for the semester. That had gone over with my parents about as well as I had expected, which was not very. When I totaled my car in a fender bender, it had almost pushed me over the edge.

I hadn't been drunk or on my phone or anything. I'd just been deep in thought. My best friend Melody was one of the first friends I'd made in college. After getting bids for the same sorority, we'd bonded over our shared love of swimming. We'd both been pretty serious about it in high school, and when we were first getting to know each other, we'd compared awards. She'd gotten more accolades for freestyle while I excelled at butterfly. But overall, it was clear that the trophies and medals painstakingly arranged in the display case in her room far outnumbered mine. We drifted apart in the last few months, though. Melody had gotten a boyfriend, and as often happens in new relationships, she'd become utterly consumed

by the honeymoon phase. That was the reason why no one had noticed she'd gone missing at first. All of us in the sorority had assumed while rolling our eyes that she was blowing us off for her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, had been racking his brain for what misstep he had made that earned him the silent treatment. It wasn't until four days later that one of our sisters had run into him on campus and finally put the pieces together. As of today, no one has heard a word from her in more than six weeks. None of us had any inkling of where she would have gone or what could have happened to her, but after this long, we knew it probably wasn't good. So I needed this break. And now that I was pulling up to my aunt and uncle's house, that familiar feeling of safety and family and Christmas was finally washing over me.

I was more than ready to spend Christmas Eve feeling like a kid again. And sitting in the back seat of my parents' sedan, I definitely did. Before my dad could even knock, the door was flung open and we were all pulled into crushing bear hugs by various members of our very enthusiastic extended family. We had barely shrugged off our coats when we found ourselves being ushered into the living room. As the last party to get there, our arrival meant one thing. The ornament hunt could commence.

We turned the corner from the foyer and there it was, illuminated by strands and strands of Christmas lights, adorned with what was by this point decades of eclectic ornaments, each utterly unique, with its own story to tell. It loomed ten feet tall in their cavernous living room and I watched my uncle's face glow with pride as we all admired it. All right kids, how about it? We raced over, reveling in the friendly competition. Jillian was the first to find a new addition and we all crowded over to see. It was a ballpoint pin printed with the words Teresa's Diner. Madison found the second. We were all very impressed.

It was a single Bluetooth headphone, no bigger than a piece of popcorn, like it had just fallen out of someone's ear. In fact, as Fernando so kindly pointed out, it still had a bit of earwax in it. We searched feverishly for the third, but after five minutes, we were struggling. Fernando plucked a Target gift card from one of the higher-up branches and excitedly asked if it was new. Nope, picked that one up in Fairville in 2014. A minute later, Madison peeked her head out from behind the tree and waved around the left shoe of a pair of yellow sandals. Mm-mm, not that one either. Brenton, 2017

Then, tucked away in the branches, only about three feet off the ground, I spotted an ornament that stopped me in my tracks. Not just because I thought it was new, but because seeing it brought a rush of emotion that I wasn't expecting. I carefully extracted the makeshift ornament from the branches. It was a swimming medal. I got it, guys, I said, but my voice wavered, making the enthusiasm sound as unconvincing as it felt. They all crowded around so we could admire the final edition. Jillian remarked on Uncle Ed's creative genius in picking a high school swimming award, and he inclined his head in a mock bow. They were laughing, congratulating me on my find,

but as badly as I wanted to share in the merriment, there was a knot in the pit of my stomach that I couldn't ignore. The queasiness didn't leave all evening and was still there as I settled into my spot on the living room couch, another benefit of being the last to arrive, and tried to fall asleep. The tree that had once been such a source of joy

was now a specter. It hovered before me, silhouetted menacingly against the living room window. I tried to force my eyes to close, to will the tension out of my shoulders, but I couldn't. Not until I untangled the question still sitting in my stomach. I threw off the covers and quietly creaked across the hardwood floor. I had to see that ornament again. I had to be closer to this object that had so suddenly and so vividly

brought Melody back into my world. I searched through the branches for the second time, but rather than the bubbly anticipation of that evening, this scavenger hunt was filled with only apprehension. I had to turn my phone flashlight on to find it, but there it was, still hidden in the back of the tree. I pulled it off, but this time something I hadn't noticed in the earlier frenzy grazed my fingertips. There was a raised pattern on the back like it was printed with something. I flipped it over and read the words. St. Anne High School.

First place 400 meter freestyle. 2019. St. Anne High School. Why did that sound so familiar? I bit the inside of my cheek, thinking hard. A memory tickled the back of my mind. Something Melody had said about Catholic school and scratchy wool uniforms. I had hoped the re-examination of the medal would disprove my suspicions, but even though the connection was flimsy, the knot of questions churning in my stomach only coiled tighter. I thought back to that evening. Nope. Pick that one up in Fairville in 2014. The gift card. Frantically, I circled the tree, searching, and then I spotted it in the higher branches. On my tiptoes, I was able to grab it. The front was nondescript, just the generic Target logo.

I flipped it over and scrolled on the back and crowded Sharpie. I found exactly what I was looking for. Happy birthday, Sophie. Here's 50 bucks to your favorite place. XOXO, Mom. Sophie. I felt guilty. More than guilty.

Distraught. At the thoughts now running through my mind, but at the very least, I had to prove myself wrong. I opened Google on my phone and typed in Fairville 2014 Sophie. The results were a barrage. Young woman goes missing from her job at local daycare. Sophie Forrester, 24, was last seen as she went on her lunch break at a local daycare. Her supervisor contacted law enforcement after Forrester left her 30-minute break and never returned.

Then an article from a few months later. Mother pleads for the safe return of her missing daughter. In a press statement Thursday, Catherine Forrester stated that she would not stop searching for her daughter Sophie, who had been missing for just over five months. Then a couple weeks after that, the body of a young woman who went missing from her job at a daycare in April was found Saturday by a hiker. The medical examiner ruled the cause of her death to be homicide. Details have yet to be released.

My heart thudded sluggishly in my chest. No, no, this was not right. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe her wallet had fallen out of her purse while some stranger who was not my Uncle Ed abducted her. I felt like my legs might go out from under me. I gently placed the metal in the gift card on the floor, side by side. If I was going to let myself indulge in this ridiculous theory, I had to do everything I could to be sure. What was the other ornament he'd mentioned earlier? He said he picked it up in Grenton in 2017.

Was it a sock or something? No, a sandal. It was easy to pick out from amongst the foliage. The vibrant yellow was impossible to miss, and I snatched it from the branches. This time, I knew what to look for. I typed in, The first article that popped up was from August of that year. The body of a young woman was found Thursday on the side of Butterfield Road in Grenton. Her cause of death has yet to be determined,

and police have asked for Road in Grenton. Her cause of death has yet to be determined and police have asked for help in determining her identity. I pressed the back button on my phone hoping the next headline would say, killer caught in case of murdered Jane Doe with a mugshot of some stranger. But that's not what it said. It said, Jane Doe identified as Andy Blum, 27, of Grenton. As I scrolled, images of a strawberry blonde, freckled young woman sped past with the impersonal captions of a news article capitalizing on her tragedy. Then one photo stopped me dead in my tracks. She looked younger in it, high school aged. It was a cheesy senior portrait, a beaming teen leaning awkwardly against a brick wall, and on her feet was a yellow pair of sandals,

the left half of which I was holding. The photo blurred as my hands started to shake. I went back to the search page again and scrolled further. Vehicle of suspect in a Grenton slang revealed in security footage. I had barely processed the words before I clicked on the article. Cameras from a nearby business showed a man driving away in a blue older model Dodge Ram.

I froze. Slowly, I raised my gaze from my phone and looked out through the front window towards the driveway. Sitting there, barely visible in the moonlight, was my uncle's pride and joy. His deep blue 1997 Dodge Ram. The thousand explanations that had been ricocheting through my mind went silent. These were not ornaments. These were trophies.

This was not a whimsical Christmas tradition. This was the obsession of a very sick man. My hand fell to my side and the sandal slipped out of my fingers, thudding dully on the ground. My breathing sped up, getting shallower with each inhale. The tears started before I could think to stop them. Then I was shocked out of my panic by a blinding light. I whipped around, suddenly face to face with my uncle, hand on the light switch. He looked wary, almost worried when he saw the tears on my face. Then I followed his eyes as they scanned the room and registered the array of ornaments on the floor in my phone, open to an article about a woman whose shoe lay between us. Our eyes met. For a split second I saw something flash across his face.

The floor creaked as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Then he relaxed his posture and pasted a toothy grin on his face. One that didn't quite reach his eyes. What are you doing up so late? You had better be very, very careful. Or Santa's going to put you on the naughty list. Ah, what a way to start the season, don't you agree? Though you might triple-check your tree for any new additions.

If it's not silver and gold painting the scene, it might just be a crime. Ho, ho, ho! I'm just kidding. But honestly, you should get a receipt for each of those tacky ornaments. Just saying, a dangling snow globe looks suspicious. Full Body Chills is an Audiochuck production. This episode was written by Nina Schmidt and read by

Jamie Lake. This story was modified slightly for audio retelling, but you can find the original in full on our website. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?