Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I'm A Cop and I Work for the Government's Department of MYSTERIES | Scary Stories

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Story written by Stephen & Rachel of Lighthouse Horror. For usage rights or more information, please contact us at [e-mail] Art from NinerioMore of the artist’s works at ninerioarts  Original YouTube link: I'm A Cop and I Work for the Government's Department of MYSTERIES.  We have THREE RULES.        Merch: lighthousehorror.shopFor more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | PatreonMusic:Lucas King - YouTubeMyuu - YouTube IncompetechDarren Curtis Music - YouTube Thank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this new creepypasta story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new episodes every week, featuring ghost stories, haunted encounters, mysteries, true stories, creepypasta, and anything supernatural and paranormal. Don't miss out on the thrill and suspense that await you in each episode!

I used to be a normal detective, a regular guy in a big city, doing my job. I like the job. I like the city. I like the mess of it all. The traffic, the shouting, the late-night food carts with the same guys working the grill. Faces greasy with sweat, but still cracking jokes. I like the feeling of always moving, always chasing something. I like that even the worst parts of it, the grime, the crime. The people who barely made ends meet felt honest in a way nothing else did.

I wasn't a good guy, but I wasn't a bad one either. I did my work. I followed the rules when they made sense. When they didn't, I bent them until they did. I had a partner back then, Sanchez. Sanchez had been my partner for five years. He was sharp, steady. The kind of cop you wanted at your back when things went sideways. He had a wife, a dog, a life outside the job.

He used to tell me I needed one too. Alan, you can't just work and eat hot dogs the rest of your life. You need something else, he'd say. But I didn't. I had the job, and I had the city. That was enough. And then we got called to a robbery gone wrong. Some guy holed up in a liquor store, waving a pistol around,

screaming about how the government had planted thoughts in his brain. One of those situations you handle a dozen times in a career, and it should have been easy. It wasn't. I don't remember the worst of it. I remember the gunshots. I remember Sanchez on the ground. His eyes wide. His mouth open like he was trying to say something.

I remember getting hit hard in the ribs. The floor coming up fast. and then nothing. I woke up in a hospital three days later. My body felt heavy, distant, like it didn't belong to me. I tried to move and pain lit up my side, sharp and deep. The nurse told me I was lucky. A concussion, some cracked ribs, a bullet that had torn through the muscle of my hip,

and shattered something important on its way out. They'd patched me up as best they could, but it would take time, a lot of time. I should have felt relieved, but instead I felt wrong, like something had shifted inside me, like the world wasn't fitting together the way it used to. Then I saw it, the first one. It was sitting on the edge of my hospital bed,

just next to the nurse. It wasn't human. Its skin looked like. like dried out leather, stretched too tight over sharp bones. Its ears were long and pointed, twitching at the sounds in the room. Its nose was split down the middle, curling up at the edges like something rotten left out too long. Its mouth was too wide, teeth too long, yellowed like old piano keys. Its fingers drummed against the nurse's arm. Light as a spider's touch. She didn't notice. She was adjusting my IV, checking my chart, her face blank with a

tired efficiency of someone who'd done this a hundred times before. The thing beside her shifted, tilting its ad, its black, wet eyes darted toward me, and it knew I could see it. I tried to tell myself I was imagining it, that it was the The concussion, you know, the pain meds, the trauma. But it was still there, blinking, watching. And then it smiled. Not a human smile. Not a friendly one.

Its lips peeled back, gums too dark, teeth too big. And it leaned closer. Your eyes are open now, it said. The nurse didn't hear. I turned my head, shutting my eyes tight, heart thudding. And when I looked back, it was gone. But things were different after that. That was only the beginning.

The next few months were hell. Recovery was slow. Least my body healed faster than my head. The ribs stopped aching after a while, the bruises. faded, but the feeling of wrongness never left. The sight never stopped after that. I saw a goblin crouched beside the hot dog stand I used to visit every day, gnawing on something too dark and too wet to be food.

The vendor didn't notice. He slathered mustard on a bun, handed it off, made change without even seeing the creature licking its two long fingers just inches from him. I saw a kelpie in the water fountain near my office, its long fingers trailing through the water, its skin shifting between the sleek hide of a horse and the pale, damp flesh of something pretending to be human. People sat around it, tossing in pennies,

checking their phones, drinking their coffee. No one saw. Inside the coffee shop, a fairy stood behind the counter, pouring drinks with hands that shimmered too much in the light. Its skin had the sheen of beetle shells, dark and iridescent. Its smile was too sharp. It moved with an elegance that wasn't human. The barista working next to it didn't even seem to notice.

They were everywhere. and I saw them all. The department didn't know what to do with me after I came back. I wasn't the same, and they could tell my psyche boughs were clean on paper. I said the right things. Pass the test, but I wasn't fooling anyone. The way I looked at things, the way I hesitated in places I never used to, the way my eyes moved too fast, like I was tracking something.

no one else could see. It made people uneasy. The brass didn't want to put me back on regular cases. Too much liability. Too many questions. But they weren't ready to cut me loose either. I had a reputation, but good one. So they gave me to the Department of Mysteries. Now that's not the official name, but it's what everybody called it before the files disappeared into locked cabinets. Used to be where they sent the crazy cases. The ones that didn't make sense. The ones nobody wanted to touch.

Haunted houses. Farms where the crops died for no reason. People who went missing and turned up years later with no memory, tied to places they'd never been before. The department wasn't big. Four people when I joined, counting me. All of them had seen things, or at least, believed in the things they couldn't explain. Most cases were cold, filed away under unsolved,

until someone needed them buried properly. We weren't supposed to find real answers, just paperwork solutions, something people could accept. But I saw things, real things. So they started using me. It started small. Someone thought their house was haunted. I went in. Walked around, saw the ghost of a woman standing by the fireplace, wringing her hands. She didn't belong there, so I helped her leave. A week later, the family moved back in. No more noises in the walls, no more cold spots. House sold fast after that.

Word got around. Now, most of my cases are real estate jobs. Investors don't like properties with reputations. They don't like it when tenants refuse to stay. When bad things keep happening, when buyers back out because a neighbor swears something just isn't right. So they send me? I go in, I look, I clear out whatever's there, and I sign the papers that say everything is fine. It's not a bad gig.

Pays steady and the work is simple. A ritual here, a lost ghost there. sometimes a few goblins in the attic or something worse in the basement. But my favorite part of the job, it's not the work. It's the mysteries. I'd always been a damn good detective. I was smart, too. Not, I don't know, Harvard smart.

Not the kind of guy who could rattle off legal codes or recite whole pages from case law, but I noticed things. The details others missed. That's why I was good at my job. That's why I loved it. And now, I got to use that skill on cases that had been cold for decades, unsolved, because no one could see what I saw. There was a sick kind of satisfaction in that in finding the missing pieces, in looking at old reports, and knowing exactly what had been standing in the background of those crime scene photos, unseen by every cop, every investigator,

every expert who had combed through them before me. The way a girl had vanished from her bedroom one night without a single trace, because something had come through the wall and taken her. The way a whole family had disappeared from their farmhouse, leaving the dinner table set, the food untouched, because they'd opened the wrong door in the basement, a door that shouldn't have been there.

I could solve them. I could see them. But there were things I hated about the job, too. Specifically, three rules, and I found them out the hard way. The first rule, never use your real name when dealing with monsters. It was one of the first things I learned the hard way. Now, not all monsters are bad. That was another thing.

Some of them lived normal lives, worked normal lives, worked normal jobs, blended into the city so well that even I had trouble picking them out sometimes. Half-human, half-something-else people, were more common than anyone realized. They rode the subway. They delivered packages. They managed stores, and they all knew the rules better than I did. Names had power. Real power. The kind of old world, ancient magic that had existed long before cities, before people had figured out how to name things in the first place. When parents named their kids, they weren't just choosing something that sounded good. They were shaping something. There was intent, a wish buried inside every name, a little push

toward a certain kind of life. Maybe they wanted their kid to be strong, so they named him after a warrior. Maybe they wanted her to be wise, so they gave her the name of a saint. Those things had weight, even if most people didn't believe it anymore. But monsters did. And they knew how to use it. The first time I messed up, I was still new to the job. Some idiot had summoned something in the basement of an old bookstore. Not a demon, not a ghost.

Something in between. Something with too many hands and a mouth that stretched the wrong way. I had the tools to get rid of it, and I thought that was enough. I was cocky, and I didn't see the trap until it was too late. It asked my name. I gave it. Not my full name, not even my first name, just a nickname. But that was enough.

It laughed and... I felt something twist. I got out of that basement, but for weeks afterward I wasn't right. I had bad luck in ways that felt deliberate. I'd reach for my gun and it would jam. I'd turn a corner and find myself somewhere I shouldn't be, somewhere dark and empty and waiting. The thing in the basement hadn't hurt me that night,

but it had left something behind. A mark I couldn't show. I had to go back, had to bargain for my name back. I won't say what I gave up for it. After that, I stopped using my real name. I used fakes, a different one every time depending on the situation. Some of them were borrowed from old cases, some were pulled from thin air. The department helped, wiping my records from every database they could,

erasing me from the parts of the internet that mattered. No one I dealt with could track me down in any real way, because names could be used, and if the wrong thing had yours, it had you. Ferrys were the worst about it. Most people thought of them as beautiful, graceful, the kind of creatures that belonged in old stories moving through forest with grounds of flowers, whispering secrets to the wind. That was a lie.

They were beautiful, but not in a way that felt right. Their teeth were always a little too sharp, their eyes a little too knowing. They spoke in circles, weaving words together in ways that made it easy to get lost, easy to give something up without realizing it. They knew how to twist the meaning of things, how to make an innocent sentence into a promise you never intended to keep, and they knew the power of a name better than anything else. That's why so many of them worked in coffee shops. People were unguarded there. Tired, distracted, half-listening as they rattled off their orders. They didn't think twice about

saying their name. Didn't hesitate when the barista asked so they could scribble it on a cup. It was a habit. A small thing. But sometimes the wrong person was listening. Most fairies wouldn't do anything drastic. They like to play with people more than they'd like to destroy them. Maybe they'd make you forget things. Small things at first. Where you left your keys, the name of an old friend, Maybe they'd tie little bits of bad luck to you. Nothing major, just enough to keep you off balance. And if you really pissed him off, you'd disappear. It happened before I remembered the case.

The guy had been a swindler. Not the kind who lurked in alleyways or ran street scams. The kind who wore tailored suits and worked in high-rises, smiling as he ruined people's lives. He'd made his fortune selling loans to people he knew would never be able to pay him back. It was legal, technically. The paperwork was clean, but it was predatory. He sought out the desperate, the ones with no other options,

the ones clinging to the edge, and offered them a way out that only drag them deeper. Some lost their homes. Some lost everything. Their debts would follow them until they died, and even then, the banks would come knocking for whatever scraps were left. He had no shame about it, bragged about it even, called it smart business. Then one night, he went drinking with some of his Wall Street friends, ended up at a club, met a bartender, she was beautiful, graceful in a way that didn't belong to this world. He saw her, he wanted her, and he assumed he could have her. Maybe he put his hands somewhere they shouldn't have been.

Maybe he made a joke he shouldn't have. Maybe he just looked at her the wrong way. Then, he bragged about what he did. He told her all about his so-called smart business and how much money he'd earned doing it. She asked his name. He gave it. And then...

He was gone. None. Didn't show up to work the next morning. No calls, no text. His office thought maybe he was nursing a bad hangover. But a day turned into a week. A week turned into a month. It got passed around between precincts until they ran out of places to look. Landed on my desk after two months. No ransom, no leads. Just a man who'd vanished into thin air. I solved it in less than a week. But it had been too late. By the time the case closed, his body had washed up in the city canal. His tongue was missing.

Not torn out. Cut. The wound was jagged, rough. Like someone had used a dull knife and didn't care about the mess. His eyes were glassy. and his lungs were filled with water. So that's the first rule. Never reveal your real name.

It holds power. And those who have your name have power over you. And vice versa. The second rule. Never take what you can't give back and always respect those around you. It sounded like something you'd tell a kid in middle school. The golden rule, you know, basic manners.

But it was more than that. It was survival. All the monsters, whether they meant to or not, operated the same way. There was an unspoken agreement between their kinds. A balance. They never took without giving something in return. They never exchanged without making sure both sides had something to walk away with. Didn't always mean fairness.

it didn't mean kindness. It just meant that everything had a cost. Genies, fairies, and witches were the trickiest about it. They knew how to twist a deal, how to take the most while giving the least. They'd give you exactly what you asked for. And somehow it would still ruin you.

The fine print in their agreements was the kind you could only see after it was too late. But some monsters were more honest. Goblins, for one. Centaurs, too. Some of the mermaids, depending on where they came from. Their kind didn't play tricks for fun. They still expected something in return, but the rules were clear. No loopholes, no riddles. That was how I built my informant system. I had eyes all over the city. Above ground, underground, even though, in the lakes. I employed goblins, a few fairies, mermaids when I needed them, a centaur or two that roamed the outer edges of the burrows. They all wanted something. Information was priceless in this

field, and I knew better than to take it without offering something back. Luckily for me, monsters loved chocolate. It was one of the few things they couldn't get on their own. The real stuff anyway. Grocery store brands didn't count. The processed waxy junk most people ate wasn't good enough. They wanted the kind that melted rich on the tongue, the kind that came from old family-run factories, the kind that was made with care. I always kept a candy bar in my pocket. It was the fastest way to make a trade. A simple thing for a simple favor. A small piece of information an answer to a question, I didn't have time to dig for myself. Sometimes that was all I needed. But when I needed real information, I went to Rooney. Runey was a goblin, one of the oldest I knew.

He'd been around before I was born, and probably before my parents were born too. He was small, but not frail. His skin was the color of tarnished brass, rough and knotted like an old tree. His fingers were long, always twitching, always moving, as if they were reaching for something to tinker with. His eyes were dark, quick, full of something sharp and knowing. And he liked peanut butter. It was the one thing he would take above anything else. He wouldn't turn down good chocolate, but if I came with peanut butter, especially the good stuff, the kind that was thick and a little salty.

I could ask for big favors. I made an effort to get it for him when I could. He could smell it when I got close. I'd be 50 feet away when I'd hear him sniff the air, tilt his head towards me, and ask. Is that peanut butter? Now Rooney had access to places no human ever would. He knew the underground tunnels that stretched below the city.

old maintenance shafts and forgotten passageways that twisted and turned for miles. He could slip through cracks in the walls, scuttle through vents, listened through grates in the streets. He heard conversations that people thought were private. He knew things before they ever hit the surface. More than once, he'd fed me information that cracked a case wide open. There was one in particular I never would have solved without him. A den of monsters had set up a smuggling operation.

They weren't trafficking people or drugs. They weren't dealing in weapons or cash. They were trading stolen goods, artifacts, relics, things that had been pulled from the old world and dragged into the new things that still held power. The kind of things that shouldn't have been passed around in back rooms in alleys like cheap merchandise. I knew something was happening, but I didn't know where. I had dead leads and bad intel.

The department was ready to drop it. File it away as another unsolved case. Then Rooney told me where to look. He knew the tunnels better than anyone. He knew which ones were being used, which ones had new footprints in the dirt, which ones led to places they shouldn't. He led me to the hideout.

And with that, the case was closed. That was the second rule. Because the monsters weren't so different from people. They had their own ways, their own laws, their own sense of fairness. They didn't take kindly to those who stole, who lied, who thought they could cheat the system. You could trick a human and get away with it. Maybe they'd take you to court. Maybe they'd come after you in other ways.

But in the end, they were bound by human rules. Monsters weren't. If you took from them without offering something in return, they'd take something from you instead, something you couldn't afford to lose. So never take what you can't give back. And always, always, respect those around you. The third rule, never show fear,

never act out of fear. It was something they taught in the academy. It was something written between the lines of the Bible, something old-timers in the department, used to say like a prayer before stepping into danger. But in this line of work, it was more than that. It was survival. Monsters could smell it.

Some, in the literal sense, like bloodhounds tracking prey. But others in a way that was harder to explain. Fear cold to them. It made you easier to find, easier to follow. It made you small and small things, fragile things, things that curled in on themselves like dying insects. Those things got eaten first. The rule wasn't about being fearless. That was impossible. Fear was natural. Fear kept you alive. But you had to control it. You could feel afraid, but you could never let it rule you.

The moment you let fear decide your actions, you lost. There was one case that still haunted me. A cold case, decades old. It started slow, missing people, one here, one there. The kind of people nobody looked for too hard. Hobos, prostitutes, drifters. Single people. who lived on the edges of nowhere.

People with no families, no one to report them gone. The cases stretched back years, scattered across different precincts, buried under mountains of other unsolved disappearances. But last year, the numbers started going up. Too many, too fast. With the help of my informants, I found out why a vampire clan had gotten greedy. Most vampires kept their heads down, fed where they could without drawn attention. They were smart enough to know the rules.

But this group had overstepped. They weren't just hunting. They were farming. They were trading human beings like cattle. They tried to be smart about it, spreading out their operations, moving between cities, but they got sloppy. They took too many, too quickly. and even people who normally wouldn't have cared started noticing.

With Rooney's help, I tracked down their den, an old abandoned factory in the industrial district, the kind of place no one looked twice at. The place reeked of death before I even stepped inside. I'd never needed backup before. That night I did. The things we found inside weren't people anymore. Not really.

There were cages, rows of them, lining the walls like kennels. Inside the bodies were limp, shriveled, barely breathing. Tubes ran from their arms and necks, draining them slow, keeping them alive just enough to bleed them over and over. A sick kind of factory. A human farm. I froze. It was only for a second, a heartbeat maybe two. My grip on my gun loosened. My brain struggled the process what I was seeing to fit it into something that made sense. And that was all it took. The vampire closest to me moved fast, knocking me off my feet. I hit the ground hard, my gun slipping

from my grip, skidding across the floor. It was on me in an instant. snarling, clawed fingers digging into my arms, teeth snapping inches from my throat. I wrestled against it, trying to get my knife up, trying to get the leverage I needed. And then a gunshot rang out. The vampire jerked, a bullet ripping through its shoulder. It whipped around, eyes locking onto the source of the shot, a woman, still trapped in her cage. one of the weak ones. But somehow she'd managed to grab the gun I dropped.

She tried to fire again, but she never got the chance. The vampire was on her in less than a second. It slammed her against the bars, tore into her throat, before I could do a damn thing. I killed it a moment later, my knife punching up through its ribs. Too late. She'd been breathing when I walked.

and she wasn't anymore. I got the rest of them out, but not her. I went to her funeral. No one else did. It was a county burial. No name on the stone, no mourners, just a hole in the ground and a cheap wooden cross that would rot before the year was up.

I stood there for a long time after the workers left. I didn't say anything, didn't pray. No family, no friends, no history anyone could find. Just another lost person, forgotten by the world, even before she'd died. But not by me. I stood there for a long time after the workers left. Didn't feel right to let her go like that. Not after what she'd done.

Not after what she'd tried to do. So I straightened my back, lifted my. my chin, and said the words, the ones they teach you in the academy, the ones meant for officers who die in the line of duty, for the ones who showed bravery, even when it cost them everything. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends, I sent. I spoke her name once, Rosie, and then I walked away. That was the last time I let fear stop me.

You could feel afraid, but you couldn't act afraid. You had to hold on tight to your gun, steady your breath, and push forward. You had to think. Even when your instincts screamed at you to run, even when you when the thing in front of you looked like it crawled straight out of a nightmare. You were allowed to be afraid. But you could never be a coward. Not even for a second. I hunted them down. I hunted them all down. Every last vampire involved. It took time. 13 months to be exact. They didn't all stay in the city.

smarter ones ran the moment they realized the operation was gone, but they didn't run far enough. The ones who stayed tried to blend in, slipping back into old routines, feeding in quieter ways. None of it mattered. I found them anyway. I used everything I had, every favor I was owed, every informant I could reach. Rooney was my main source, slipping. through the underground tunnels, listening through the grades. He told me where to start looking. A fairy bartender tipped me off to one hiding in a club downtown. A centaur with connections to the docks helped me track another to a shipping container

headed out of state. Some went easy. They knew the score. Knew what I was there to do. They didn't beg, didn't waste time with lies or excuses. They fought, or they ran, or they just stood there, waiting for me to do what I'd come to do. Others weren't so graceful. They tried to make deals, tried to bribe me, manipulate me, talk their way out of it.

They offered money, information, power. Some of them offered me things I didn't even have a name for. None of it worked. I wasn't in it for revenge exactly. I wasn't a vampire hunter, no matter what people started calling me. I didn't care what they were, didn't care about the reputation I was getting. I just wanted to set things right. And I did.

One by one, I track them down, and one by one, I ended them. When it was all over, I went back to Rosie's grave. She hadn't had a name on her marker at first, just that cheap wooden cross. But I found it in the reports. Rosie Delgado. No family listed. No known next of kin. Just another lost person, another name in a file.

Nobody had bothered to read until it was too late. So every once in a while, I brought her something. Flowers, mostly. The cheap kind. from corner stores, the kind people bought when they didn't know what else to bring. Sometimes coffee still hot. I know, stupid, probably, but I left it there anyway. I did the same for Sanchez.

I never stayed long. I just left the flowers, the coffee, and walked away. I didn't know if it meant anything. They were gone. Nothing I did would change that. Nothing I left at their graves. would make a difference to them. Maybe they wouldn't have cared either way.

Maybe Rosie wouldn't have wanted flowers. Maybe Sanchez would have laughed at the idea of me standing at his headstone, pretending I had anything worth saying. But I did it anyway. Because someone should. Because people like them got forgotten. That was the thing about the sitting. It kept moving.

It didn't stop. for the dead. Hell, it barely stopped for the living. No matter how much someone had meant, no matter what they'd done, the world went on without him. A few weeks, a few months, and they became names on paper, a marker in the ground, an echo. I never really gave myself time to adjust, you know? One day, I was a detective with a partner chasing cases that made sense. The next Sanchez was dead, and I could see monsters. There hadn't been a transition, no slow realization, no moment to breathe and come to terms with it.

One second, I was one person. The next I was someone else entirely. I'd never stopped to think about what that meant. Never asked myself if I was okay. Didn't go to therapy, didn't take time off, just threw myself into the work, let the new cases filled the space my best friend had left behind. I became a detective because I thought I was smart, because I loved the chase, the way a mystery unfolded when he knew where to look. I liked being the guy who saw the things other people missed. It had never been about justice,

not really. But now it was different. I'd meant the people, and I'd met the monsters, both human and not, and I wanted to protect the ones who deserved it. That was the thing. There were more rosies out there, more people like her, living their lives just trying to get by. And there were more like Sanchez, too. Good people with families, with people who loved them, who were just doing their best in a world that didn't always care if they made it home at the end of the day. I had purpose now, more than I ever had before.

And that was enough. Well, I guess that's it. The rules keep me alive. Never use your real name. Never take what you can't give back. Never show fear. They aren't complicated, aren't fancy, but they work. The cases don't stop.

Some are simple. A spirit clinging to an old apartment. A kelpie lurking in a flooded basin. A cursed object that needs to be buried somewhere deep. Somewhere forgotten. Others are worse. People go missing, and sometimes I don't find him in time. Sometimes they come back wrong.

And sometimes they don't come back at all. Rooney still feeds me information. He has a new hideout now. Deeper in the tunnels, somewhere even I haven't seen. He says it's safer that way, and I don't argue. He tells me when something big is moving through the city. When someone is making deals, they shouldn't. When another idiot with a grudge tries to summon something they don't understand.

It's a full-time job keeping the balance. The fairies in the coffee shops, the mermaids in the lakes, the goblins in the underground, they all have their own worlds, their own rules. Most of them don't care about humans. some tolerate us, a few like us, and some see us as just another resource to use. I do what I can to make sure the wrong things don't spread, that the worst of them don't take too much. If you ever find yourself in this line of work, remember the rules, and if you need more than that, if you really want to do this, come find me. The Department of Misty.

is always hiring. Just have a fake name ready. And I'll teach you the rest.