Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Anansi’s Goatman: When the Terror Blends In

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

In the summer of 2012, a teenager's camping trip on remote Alabama woodland turns into something no one can explain. What begins with strange smells and figures standing motionless in the dark escalates when the group realizes there's an extra person in their group... without anyone noticing. The horror isn't a monster in the woods. It's a creature already inside the room.For more follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226For Ad-free listening to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bot. Every Monday, Dr. Bot goes where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files, not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations, waiting for a closer look. Hidden history drops every Monday.

Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery. This is Crime House. A group of teenagers goes camping deep in the woods of rural Alabama, and something follows them back to the trailer. An extra person appears in a room that nobody remembers inviting, and a voice outside the door that sounds almost human. but not quite.

It's a story that makes you wonder, what kind of evil is lurking in the woods? Welcome to Twisted Tales, a Crimehouse original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week, I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own,

I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments, the creepier, the better. And for early access and ad-free listening, subscribe to our Crimehouse Plus community on Apple Podcasts. We're also on YouTube with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe. to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life. Today I'm reading one of the most famous creepypastas of all time.

It's called Anansi's Goatman story, and it was originally posted on 4chan's X paranormal board on September 28th, 2012. The author has never been identified. It was posted completely anonymously by someone only known as Anansi, which honestly makes it even creepier. Unlike a lot of creepypastas that are clearly written to be fiction, This one reads like a real person sitting you down and telling you the most terrifying experience of their life. It's raw, it's messy, it's full of profanity, and it's packed with the kind of small, tiny details

that people only include when they're genuinely trying to make someone understand what happened to them. And the thing that makes it so effective, it's not about a monster chasing you through the woods. It's about a monster that's already inside the room with you, sitting next to you, eating. your food, and you don't even know it. This is one of those creepypastas that people swear is real. On Goodreads, yes, it has a Goodreads page. Reviewers describe it as their go-to creepypasta for scaring themselves, saying that it earthed them for days after reading it.

One reviewer said that the scariest part was rereading it a second and a third time, trying to figure out what they missed, just like the characters in the story. People online have compared it to John Carpenter's The Thing, The Invasion of the body snatchers, even to the Twilight Zone episode, Monsters are due on Maple Street. It regularly appears on the best creepypasta list, along with heavyweights like the Russian sleep experiment, Squidward Suicide, and Ben drowned.

But I think this one hits differently. Those stories rely on shock or sometimes surreal imagery. This one relies on math. All right, let's get into it. Our narrator is a 16-year-old black kid from Chicago. We'll call him Anansi. His family has roots down in Alabama. His uncle owns a big stretch of land outside of Huntsville,

including a house and a couple of trailers set way back in the woods, the kind people use for hunting or for camping. One summer, Anansi's down-south cousins convinced him to go out and camp at the trailers for a few days. They tease him for being a city kid, but it's all good fun. They collect food, kill a pig, and some chickens, packed up supplies, and head deep into the woods. Right away, something feels.

feels off. The air has this weird electric smell, like ozone, the charged feeling right before a thunderstorm. But the sky is clear, so they don't think too much about it and unpack. There's about 11 of them total. Five girls, six boys, all around 15 to 17 years old. They swim in a little creek, play football, just typical teenager stuff. One of the boys who joins them is a local white kid named Tanner, whose family's property sits right up against Anansi's uncle's land. Tanner's dad had come out of the bushes earlier, carrying a shotgun, and warned them to be careful and stay together. He said there was a big animal in the woods. One of their pigs had been ripped apart and eaten a few days before. They assumed it was a big cat or coyotes, even though

coyotes usually don't mess with live animals that big. As evening sets in, Tanner wants to run home and asked his dad if he can camp with them overnight. Anansi's cousin, Rooster, and one of the girls' Kira tag along. It's about 7 o'clock. It'll be dark soon. So the three of them grab flashlights and head up the trail towards Tanner's property. The rest of the group stays behind. They build a campfire, make s'mores. Drink, flirt, kiss on the girls, as Anansi puts it. Normal teenage stuff. About 30 or 40 minutes later, that smell comes back, except now it's worse. It's not just ozone anymore.

It's this nasty, coppery, metallic smell, like dried blood. Like the back of your throat after a bad nosebleed that just stopped flowing. Strong enough to cut through the smoke from the campfire. They searched the trailers thinking maybe someone left a hot plate on or there's an electrical malfunction. Nothing. Everything is off. Then they hear it. People crashing through the woods running full speed down the trail.

Rooster, Tanner, and Kira come tearing through into the clearing. They don't stop. They don't say a word. They don't even break stride. They run straight past the campfire and into the trailer. Everyone follows them inside and locks the door. The fire outside is guttering lower and lower, but no one wants to go back out to feed it. It takes a while for the three of them to calm down.

Rooster, who Anansi described as a tough kid, not someone who scares easily, is crying his eyes out. flat out sobbing. Kira is staring into the window with a blank disconnected look on her face. Tanner's pants are filthy, and his eyes are bloodshot and puffy. He goes, fuck no, lock the front door, ain't nobody going outside, and then they tell the group what happened. They'd gone up to Tanner's house. His dad said, sure, he could camp out, but maybe he should take one of the hunting rifles just in case that animal that killed their pig came around. Tanner waved him off. He said that coyotes avoid people so they didn't need to worry. He packed his stuff and they started walking back. When they were about halfway through the

woods, they started hearing things moving in the trees. It was almost pitch black by now. They aimed their flashlights off the trail and saw someone standing in the woods in a little hollow. They shouted at him, told him he was scaring the hell out of them, and, what a dicky was. That was when Rooster realized that the guy was facing away from them. The three of them weren't about to stick around, so they kept walking. That's when the copery smell hit them hard. They looked to the other side of the trail, another figure, also turned away. But this one was closer to the path. They started power walking. Tanner kept repeating, I should have taken the fucking rifle. A low, gibbering sound began from both sides of the woods,

not words, not animal sounds. just this low, constant, inhuman noise that kept shifting in volume. The girl flashed her light to the side and saw something jerking through the trees, not walking, not running, jerking. Like the motion was wrong. The gibbering got louder and louder. When they could finally see the glow of the campfire through the trees, something came out of the woods and onto the trail behind them, about 40 yards back.

They ran. They ran as hard as they could and didn't stop until they were inside the trailer with door locked behind them. Right away, this story does something that most creepypastas don't. It makes you feel the setting, the ozone, the copper, the darkness closing in. It's not just telling you something scary happened. It's putting you in the woods with these kids. You can almost smell it. And the details about the figures facing away from them, that's one of the creepiest images I've ever encountered in a creepypasta. There's something about a person standing perfectly still in pitch black woods turn the wrong way.

That just short circuits your brain. You know instinctively that that's not right. People don't just do that. I also love that this story takes us time. We're not even at the scariest part yet, and I already feel my skin crawling. Most creepypastas tend to rush into the horror. This one lets the dread build naturally

the way that fear actually works in real life. It's not a jump scare. It's that slow realization that something is deeply fundamentally wrong. Now, back inside the trailer, one of Anansi's cousins, Jr., starts going on about the goat man. He says he heard about it from a Native American kid at school, a shapeshifter something like a windigo,

a creature with the head of a goat that can take human form and get among groups of people to terrorize them. And according to the legend, it's bad luck to even talk about it and worse to see it. Everyone tells Junior to shut up. They don't need spooky talk right now, but he can't stop. He keeps saying the goat man is going to get in and get us. And here's the thing.

After what happens next, you might wish that they listen to him. On a quiet Saturday morning, five women walked into a Lane Bryant store and never came home. The man responsible for their deaths was heard and even described by the lone survivor. But despite nearly being caught, he vanished into thin air. In the years since, new technology, new investigators, and new questions have changed what's possible. But the families are still waiting for answers. The evidence is still there. In this case, isn't cold.

It's unfinished. Listen to counterclock season 8 wherever you get your podcasts. So they're locked inside the trailer, terrified. The girls are crying, the cousins are arguing about whether it's people messing with them. Suddenly, the ozone smell just stops. Not fades, stops. One second it's there, the next is gone. Anasi says that to this day he never experienced anything like that.

Smells don't just vanish, they lessen. They drift away on the breeze. This one turned off like a light. An hour or so passes. They eventually convinced themselves the people in the woods were just some locals messing with them, just some jerks trying to scare a bunch of teenagers. Anansi and his cousins don't leave, because they figure if they walk through the woods in the dark,

whoever's out there might chase them. So they go back outside, stoke the fire, and try to salvage the night. Nothing else happens, so they decide to keep staying at the trailers. For most of that second night, everything is normal. They're outside around 1 a.m. getting drunk and telling ghost stories. Someone finishes some spooky story, Anansi doesn't even remember what it was about, and that's when the smell comes back. Worse than before.

It's so strong that one of the girls literally starts vomiting. Anansi stands up and can actually feel how clammy in the same. thick the air has become. There's no sign of a thunderstorm rolling in. They scramble back inside the trailer. Anansi keeps saying something feels wrong, deeply wrong, but he can't figure out what it is. It's like his brain is trying to flag something, but he can't pinpoint it. They decide to cook some food to pass the time and calm their nerves. No one's going back out there. They've got Bratworth's three packs of four, 12 total. The narrator grills them up by the stove and hands one to everybody, then gets his. After a while, one of his cousins gets up and goes back to the pot to grab

another one, but they're all out. He starts scrumbling. How come you got two and everybody else only got one? Anonzi looks up at him like he's stupid. He says, everybody only got one. There were 12 rats. If you want more, open a new pack. Twelve sausages, one each. But there were supposed to be 11 people. That's when Kira, the girl who'd been out on the trail with Rooster and Tanner, starts screaming. Oh, Jesus, oh Lord, get it out. She's crying, she's shivering, and slowly it dawns on everyone in the room what's happening. Anansi's cousin looks around. Anansi looks around.

They glance at each other. They both realize the same thing at the same time. They run out of the cabin. Kira runs out with them. everyone piles outside. Anunsi starts counting heads. Eleven people. There are only 11 now.

But there had been 12 in the trailer. They'd all eaten. They'd all been sitting together. And the entire time, there had been an extra person in the room that no one could identify. No one could say who the 12th person was. No one had spoken to them directly.

No one could describe them. But they were there. Maybe even for the whole day. Anonzi says, what makes it so disturbing is that he kind of noticed something was off. That nagging background feeling you get when you're having a good time and you don't sweat the small stuff. You don't always keep track of everyone. You assume the person sitting in the corner is someone's friend.

You don't question it. Now though, they're questioning everything. They grab big sticks and go back inside the trailer. Nobody's there. They count again. 11. Kura tells them what happened. She'd realized the count was off at the same time the cousin did.

But before she could say anything, the person sitting right next to her had grabbed her leg, hard, leaned in close to her ear and whispered something in a voice that she couldn't understand. Then it was gone. Okay, this is the part that absolutely destroyed me the first time I read the story. The sausage math. Twelve sausages, eleven people, one to spare. It's such a simple, stupid detail, and that's exactly why it's so terrifying. The horror doesn't come out from a monster jumping out.

It comes from counting. Think about how often you're in a group and you don't actually count who's there. At a party, at a barbecue, at a campfire, someone is sitting off to the side and you just assume that they came with someone else. You don't question it. This story weaponizes that assumption. That's what makes the Goatman concept so different than other monster stories. It's not about a creature hunting you from the shadows. it's about something that can perfectly imitate a person,

well enough to sit in a room full of people, eat their food, be a part of their evening, and not get caught, until the math doesn't add up. And the detail about Kira, that it grabbed her leg and whispered something before it vanished, is a masterful detail from whoever wrote this. It's not just that it was there, it's that it knew it was discovered.

And in that last second, it wanted her to know, too, like a parting message. like a threat. The USC digital folklore archives actually has an academic entry on this story. They call it one of the more interesting examples of long-form internet horror, comparing it to the found footage movies like Cloverfield in how it uses a first-person youth perspective to make the supernatural feel real and immediate. If you're not scared yet, buckle up because Act 3 is where the story goes completely off the rails. Early the next morning, the group splits up.

Some of them want to leave immediately. Others want to wait for full daylight. A few of them still think that this is some kind of elaborate prank and want to stay. Four people leave, including Kira. Tanner goes with the departing group to grab the rifle from his house and says that he'll come right back. Anansi has to stay because he's got the keys to his uncle's cabin and has to lock up. By 4 p.m., there are seven of them left. Tanner still hasn't come back.

They're getting extremely antsy. The only reason Anansi stopped begging them to leave was because Tanner went to get the gun. Then around 5.30, one of the cousins says casually, Kira's outside. Everyone looks. Sure enough, there's a girl standing by the fire pit with her back to the cabin. Anansi gets that sick feeling in his gut. Kira had left with the morning room. She was terrified.

She was praying to Jesus the night before. Why was she come back? And that's when Anansi noticed. it. The faintest twinge of the copper smell creeping back in. He tells the others, they laugh at him. They think he's set this up to scare them. He looks at them and says he's being completely serious. One of the girls goes outside to get Kira. She gets halfway there and stops cold. The figure starts heaving, like someone laughing with their back turned, but making absolutely no sound. A silent, shuddering, full-body heave.

And that's when Anansi realizes the entire woods have gone dead silent. No birds, no geese. And it's late September, the end of summer. So you should be hearing huge geese honking, squirrels chit-chatting, something. There's nothing. Just the silence and the thing by the fire. Anansi yells at the girl to get back inside right now. She does.

They lock the door. They pull down all. all of the shades except one and put a guy in a chair to watch. Kira stands there, motionless, for the next 20 minutes. Then a massive bang on the door. Everyone jumps. The banging is deafening, half knocking, half like something throwing its weight against the frame. Then they hear Tanner's voice screaming. Let me the fuck in, stop fucking playing.

Tanner stumbles inside with a rifle and a box of ammo. There's nobody else outside. The figure by the fire is gone. He tells them what he saw. Walking up to the campsite, he spotted a girl standing in the clearing. Not Kira, he was clear about that. It was a girl, but it wasn't her. She turned towards him with a slack-jawed expression and just stared,

slowly tracking him as he walked around the edge of the clearing. He said he didn't realize until he was halfway to the trailer that she was getting closer. She started by the fire, but without him seeing her move, she'd been inching towards him. By the time he reached the locked door and turned around, she was half the distance to where he stood. He looks around the trailer, goes pale, pulls Anansi aside and whispers, You know there are only seven of us in here, right? It has slipped back in. While they were distracted, while they were busy arguing about who was leaving and who was staying,

while they were outside figuring out what to do, it had walked right back into their group again. They recounted, seven. But everyone swears that there were eight just a moment ago. But here's where it gets even more intense. Tanner's older cousin Reese, who was about 19, arrives around sundown with another rifle in a heavy-duty lantern flashlight.

As he walks up, they whisper through the windows to Tanner. Are you sure that's your cousin? He says yes. Rees comes inside looking confused. He asked where their other little buddy is, a girl he's seen on the trail standing in his path, staring at him slackdod. He tried to talk to her.

She wouldn't answer. She just smiled. He kept walking and she followed behind, always lagging a little. He said no matter how slowly he walked, she stayed a little behind him. The copper smell got stronger, the closer he got to the camp.

At one point, she said something really low that he didn't catch. He turned around and she was right up on him, inches away from his face. He stepped away, startled. He reached out to touch her shoulders to see if she was okay, but his hand missed. She was off to the side of where he had reached, like she shifted while he was looking directly at her. Then she was gone. Safe to say everyone is freaking out by this point.

They load the rifles. They eat something. They turn on the radio, but they can't get a station. They wait. Anansi writes that he prays to this day that the whole thing was just some elaborate prank that his cousins played and just never admitted to. Around 11 p.m., the copper smell turns into something far worse, the stench of cooked blood and singed hair. Tanner and Reese grabbed the rifles instantly. There's a sound at the door, half knocking, half clawing, and then a voice. Anansi says it sounds like those YouTube videos of cats and dogs

whose owners have taught them how to talk. The shape of human words, but with no human rhythm, no cadence, no natural flow. He said he never thought about it before, but all people have a certain rhythm when they speak no matter what language. This thing didn't have that.

It was just sounds pushed into the approximate shape of a language. It says, let me the fuck in. Stop fucking playing. The exact words, Tanner had screamed when he was banging on the door earlier, repeated at them in that wrong, broken, inhuman voice. One of the girls starts crying and calling for Jesus. It repeats itself for almost 15 minutes, in.

Let me the fuck in. Over and over. Then the smell fades. For the next hour, they can hear something creeping around in the woods and brush, circling the trailer. Every few minutes, it comes back to the door and says something. Around 2 a.m., the smell finally disappears completely. Reese is over it.

He opens the door, walks outside with his rifle, fires a shot into the air, and shout something to the effect of, In the name of Jesus Christ, go away. He fires two more times. From the tree line by the river, something starts jibbering and hooting. Then it starts screaming.

The narrator says it sounded like a way, woman and a cat in a bag screaming together. The brush starts shaking violently. Reese fires into the tree line. Something comes out of the bushes, low to the ground, crawling towards the cabin. He shoots at it and backs inside. The screaming continues for the next two hours, constant. Things moving in the brush, but it never comes back up to the cabin. Eventually everyone falls asleep except Tanner. He's sitting in a chair by the door with his rifle across his lap. He told Anansy this part two days later after the whole ordeal was over. He'd been nodding off after the screaming finally stopped, almost asleep. Then he saw something come out of the bathroom and lie down in

the middle of the floor. He assumed it was one of them. Then he counted. Nine people in the cabin. There should have been eight. He didn't move. He didn't scream. He didn't wake anyone. He was afraid that if he did, if he startled it, if Reese woke up firing, it would kill them all. So he sat there for the rest of the night, pretending to be asleep watching it. Sometimes it would just stand up and do this weird jittery movement, like a shutter or a twitch. Or it would heave silently like it was laughing. Then it would light back down. Tanner stayed awake until the morning.

When the sun came up, the group packed their stuff and started walking into Tanner's house. Tanner stayed behind to lock up the cabin and he'd bring Anansi the keys. When he went to check the bathroom, the window was wide open. It was screenless. They never thought to lock it. That's how it had been getting in, the whole time. He caught up with the group. They walked to his house.

Reese drove them all the way home. But here's the part that the narrator didn't learn until two days later when Tanner finally told him. On that final walk back through the woods, the thing walked with them. It was a part of the group, blending in, just another teenager heading home. And as they got closer to Tanner's house, it slowly drifted to the back of the group.

Tanner said it looked him dead in the eyes. Then it walked into the woods, and that was the last time they saw it. That ending, it doesn't end with a dramatic fight or heroic escape. It ends with the creature just, leaving, looking Tanner in the eye, calmly, deliberately, and walking away. Like the whole thing was a game. Like it got what it wanted. And we don't even know what that was. And the bathroom window, the idea that this thing was crawling in and unlocked screenless window

every night lying down among sleeping teenagers pretending to be one of them, that detail haunts me. Because it means that the barrier between them and the goat man would, was never the locked door. It was a bathroom window nobody thought to check. The mimicry of Tanner's voice at the door is, for me, the single most terrifying moment. The narrator describes it so perfectly. It's not the words that are wrong. It's the rhythm. He says all people in any language have a natural cadence to when they speak. This thing didn't. It kind of sounded like an animal trying to imitate sounding human, shapes of words with nothing human behind them.

That concept that something can copy your words but can't copy your humanity is bone-chilling. What makes the story so legendary in the creepypasta community is that it taps into a fear that we all have but rarely think about, that someone in your room isn't who they seem. How often do you actually count the people in a room? If you're at a party, a campfire, a group dinner, would you notice if there was an extra person? Honestly?

What's fascinating is how the story connects to that of a much older and much deeper folklore tradition. The Goatman isn't just a creepy pasta invention. Goateman legends span the entire United States. The most documented version comes from Prince George's County, Maryland, where residents have reported encounters with a large, hairy, bipedal creature since the most documented version. 1950s. A University of Maryland folklorist named Barry Pearson has traced those legends back decades, saying they were further popularized in 1971 when the death of a local dog was blamed on the creature. Some versions say it's a scientist from a nearby agricultural research center who was mutated in an experiment gone wrong. Others say it's just something that's always

lived in the woods. In Louisville, Kentucky, there's the Pope's Lake Monster, Another half-man, half-goat, said to haunt a railroad bridge over Pope Lick Creek. That legend goes back to the 1940s and tragically this story has claimed real lives. Several people have died on the bridge while searching for the monster, including cases as recently as 2016. So these stories go deep. Half-goat, half-human creatures appear in Greek mythology as saders and in European tradition as figures like crampus.

Stories of goat-like cryptids exist in Texas, Kentucky, Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, California, you name it. What's unique about the goat man is how adaptable the legend is. It absorbs local history, local fears, local landscapes, and reshapes itself into wherever it lands. And that's exactly what the creepypasta does too. It takes the goat man out of the monster on the bridge setting. It puts it in the most terrifying context imaginable. A creature that doesn't just stalk you. It becomes you.

It sits next to you. It eats your food. It whispers in your ear. And you don't even know it's there until you count the people in the room. Anansi closes the story by saying he still praise to God that it was all just a huge prank that his cousins played on him and just never revealed. But you can tell by the way that he writes it that he doesn't actually believe that. Not really.

Because the truth is you just never know. That's the horror. You go on with your life, telling yourself it was nothing, that you just imagined it, until you count the people in the room, and the number is wrong. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about today's stories? Have you ever had a creepy experience in the woods?

Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay here. And remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it. Do you want to sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases? I'm Morgan Apshur. And I'm Kaelin Moore. And we'd love for you to check out our new show, Clues. Each Wednesday, I piece together the timelines and break down the hard facts, digging into forensic details, investigative techniques, and everything that led to justice or didn't.

And while Kaelin dives into the facts, I'm pulling out the threads, digging through the internet theory, and looking at the details that may or may not add up. From serial killers to shocking cold cases, we shine a light on the stories that have been waiting, sometimes for decades, to finally be heard. So join us as we uncover the breakthroughs, the heartbreak, and the relentless pursuit of answers, behind the world's most unforgettable investigations. Come open a case file with us every Wednesday and listen to Clues wherever you get your podcasts.