Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Candle Cove: The TV Show That Wasn’t There

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Adults on a forum reminisce about a childhood puppet show called Candle Cove — a skeletal pirate called the Skin-Taker, a cape made of children’s skin, an episode that was just screaming. The final post reframes every message above it. One of the most elegant twist endings in internet horror.For more follow Twisted Tales wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1839058226If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, 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 today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the First 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House.

A children's show that aired on a tiny local station for a couple of months in the early 70s, and then vanished. A cowardly pirate, a living ship with a grinning wooden face, and a skeleton in a top hat who tells a little girl exactly what he does with the skin he takes.

A whole generation swears they watched it, cross-legged on the living room floor, four o'clock right after the news. There's just one problem. There's no record it ever existed. Today I'm telling you the story of Candle Cove, the creepypasta that doesn't haunt a house or a camera or a video game. It haunts the one place you can never lock the door on, your own memory.

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. Crimehouse exists because of listeners like you. Want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad-free? Subscribe to Crimehouse Plus.

To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. 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 telling you the story of Candle Cove. It's about a children's television show one that a handful of strangers slowly remembered together in real time on an internet forum.

And the more they remember, the worse it gets. What makes this one special right out of the gate, most creepypastas out there are anonymous, but not this one. And its author plays a big role in what's about to play out. This might be the single most meta horror story ever written. It's a creepypasta about the way creepypastas get made, and then it went out into the world and became the, exact thing that it was imitating. The story basically predicted its own future. It weaponizes

nostalgia and we're not talking about a haunted house you've never set foot in. We're talking about the kids' show that you watched in your pajamas, the safest, warmest memories that most of us have. And fair warning, by the end of this episode, you're going to want to call your mom and ask her what you actually watched when you were little. Let me set the scene. The year is 2009. A web cartoonist named Chris Straub, A guy who built up a following making comics online is running a horror fiction website called Icor Falls. It's a place where he posts original creepy short stories and a lot of them are set in one fictional cursed little American town. And in 2009, he posts one called Candle Cove.

But he doesn't write it like a story. Instead, Chris writes the whole thing as a thread on a made-up website called the Net Nostalgia Forum, the kind of place where adults go to reminisce about the pop culture of their childhood. Think old commercials, forgotten toys, discontinued cereals, things like that. It starts with a user called Sky Shale 033. They post a question that probably feels similar to anyone who's fallen down a late-night internet rabbit hole asking, does anyone else remember this kid's show? It was called Candle Cove.

SkyShale would have been about six or seven when it came out. They lived in a town called Ironton at the time, which for context is a real place, right on the Ohio River where Ohio, Kentucky, and Wendell, West Virginia all bump into each other. The kind of place where you could see anything on local TV and it would surprise you. But Skyshills says they've never been able to find a single reference to Candle Cove anywhere. No listing, no clips, nothing. So they figured it must be some kind of tiny local station around 1971 or 72 in a weird late afternoon time slot like 4 o'clock.

Now, in the moment, that doesn't seem out of the ordinary. Old local TV barely gets documented. So of course there's no record. But almost immediately, other people start chiming in because that's what happens in threads like these. The internet is undefeated. A user named Mike Painter 65 says, yeah, that does sound familiar.

He grew up nearby and he'd have been about nine in 72. Was it about pirates? He thinks he remembers a pirate puppet at the mouth of the cave talking to a little girl. And that's the moment SkyShield lights up. Yes, other people, remember it too. They're not crazy. And from there, piece by piece, post by post, this group of strangers starts rebuilding the show from the ground up. According to their memories,

Candle Cove was a low-budget local kids show. It followed a little girl named Janice, who imagines that she's friends with a crew of pirates. The pirate ship is called The Laughing Stock, and the whole thing is stitched together with cheap marionettes and puppets, the kind of homemade, slightly off arts and crafts look that a lot of local 70s television had. The main pirate's name is Percy, and he's not a very good pirate because he gets scared too easily. He's the comic relief. By the way the people on the forum describe him is where the first little chill creeps in. One of them remembers that Percy looked like he'd been built out of parts of other dolls.

Specifically, his head was an old porcelain baby doll, an antique that didn't quite match the rest of the body. So you've got this cobbled together pirate with a creepy little vintage baby face. And as a kid, Skyshiel says Percy always kind of scared them. And then there's the ship itself. The laughing stalk had a wooden smiling face carved across the bow, with its lower jawed down in the water so it always looked like it was swallowing the sea, and it talked in this jarring vaudeville-style cackle. And the neo-nistalgia users remembered something deeply weird about it,

that sometimes the ship was a static wooden model, and then it would suddenly cut to a soft, flopping foam puppet version of the same face with mismatch eyes and a jaw that worked open and closed on a piece of fishing line. They all remember that switch being unsettling, even though they couldn't tell you why. And the whole show is soaked in this constant looping, colliving, music. You know the sound that wheezy carnival merry-go-round organ? To me, it's like the sound of fun that's been left running a little too long.

And then there's the line. Because the ship had a catchphrase. Whenever Percy had to go somewhere scary, into a cave, into a dark room, wherever the treasure was, the laughing stock would tell him, with the camera slowly pushing in on that wooden grin, one pause at a time.

You have to go inside. Don't forget this is a group of grown adults scattered across the internet who have never met. They started with nothing but a vague feeling, and within a handful of posts, they've collectively reconstructed an entire TV show, characters, music, set pieces, a catchphrase, in vivid, consistent detail.

And it feels amazing, like community. That warm rush you get when someone loves the thing that you thought only you knew about. But that's the trap, because that warm feeling is about to build into something monstrous. So what I really like about this story is the format. On the surface, it shouldn't, work. It's just usernames and timestamps and people going, wait, do you remember that part?

But because you've read a thousand threads exactly like it, your brain files it under real before it files it under scary. And once the scares do kick in, it's hard to forget that it's all made up. And the puppet details are perfect, a baby doll head on a pirate's body, a foam jaw on a fishing line. Anyone who grew up watching a certain era of kids TV watched a local show held together with hot glue and good intentions, and some of those things were genuinely nightmarish. Here's the thing that gets me, though. Nothing scary has actually happened yet. Nobody's been chased, nobody's died.

All that's happened is that a few people agreed about a TV show, and it's already creeping me out. So before this thread takes a dark turn, I want to pause and think about why Candle Cove works on you the way that it does, because once you understand the mechanism, the whole thing gets so much scarier. I think Candle Cove hooks you in for three reasons. The first one I already touched on. It hijacks nostalgia.

Most horror sends you somewhere unfamiliar, the abandoned asylum, the cabin in the woods, the curse cartridge from the creepy old man. Candle Cove does the opposite. It sends you home. To the floor of your childhood living room, to the safest, fuzziest,

most comforting corners of your memory, and then it puts in a creepy, mismatched pirate doll in it, poisoning the memories that make you feel safest. The second reason is the big one. And it's the reason that this story is genuinely deep down unsettling instead of just creepy. Candle Cove is a horror about memory itself. We tend to think of memories like little video files saved in a hard drive of our heads. You press play and the past comes back exactly as it happened. But that's not how it works at all. Every time you

remember something, your brain rebuilds it from fragments. And whenever there's a gap, your brain quietly fills it in with assumptions, with expectations, with stuff you heard earlier. Psychologists have a word for that gap filling. Confabulation. Your brain invents details to complete the picture, and you have no idea that it's happening because the invented parts feel exactly as real as the true ones. Now layer in one more thing on top of that. Memory isn't unreliable on its own. It's contagious. When you sit in a group and everybody starts swapping memories, you reshape each others. Somebody says, wasn't the ship's face foam?

And suddenly, yeah, it was foam. You can see it now. Researchers called this social contagion of memory or memory conformity. A false detail drops into the group, everyone agrees, and the agreement makes it true. And the more people confirm it, the realer it gets. And that's exactly what's happening in the candle co-thread. These people aren't recovering memories from a show. They're building one.

Each post adds a detail and the group nods and the detail hardens into fact. Here's the real-world version that you might know. In 2009, the exact year Candle Cove was posted, a researcher named Fiona Broom coined a term for this, the Mandela effect. She discovered that she and a huge number of other people vividly remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison back in the 1980s. They remembered the news coverage, the funeral. Except it never happened. Mandela walked out of prison in 1990 and lived until 2013. A massive group of people shared a detailed, confident, and completely false memory.

And once they started talking to each other about it, it only got stronger. So while Chris Straub was writing a horror story about collective false memory, the real world was busy naming the exact same phenomenon. Candle Cove is just the Mandela effect with the lights turned off. And the third reason Candle Crandall. Cove works is one that pushes it from clever into kind of brilliant. The form of the story is the fear of the story. Think about it.

The thing that scares you is the idea that a group of people can construct a false memory together just by talking. The forum thread isn't just describing the horror, it's performing it. Most horror tells you about the monster. Candle Cove builds the monster in front of you out of nothing but a common section, and it lets you feel how good and natural and communal it feels, right up until the moment it doesn't. So far, the memories have been cute, creepy, a scurdy-cap pirate, a talking ship, a little girl

and her imaginary crew. Then someone in the thread asked the question that breaks it open. Do you guys remember the villain? And one by one, the tone of every single post changes. The first thing they dredge up is a character with a face that was basically just a huge handlebar mustache sitting above a set of tall, narrow teeth. One poster was so frightened of this thing as a kid that he genuinely thought that it was Pirate Percy,

pure little kid nightmare logic. But somebody corrects him. That wasn't the villain. That was the villain's sidekick. A character named Horace Horrible with a monocle pursed on top of the mustache. The villain was something else, a marionette they called the skin taker.

Here's where you can feel the whole thread go cold. Because these adults aren't joking around anymore. They're describing. him the way that you described something you spent decades trying to forget. He'd come down from the top of the frame on his strings out of nowhere, a filthy skeleton wearing a brown top hat and a scattered cape with glass eyes set into the skull that were too big for it. And his clothes, the hat, the cloak, they were all sewn up, stitched together wrong in crazy uneven patches. And one of them types the question that's been sitting under the whole conversation.

Wait, was it supposed to be children's skin? Then somebody remembers the worst part. The skin taker's mouth didn't open and close like a normal puppet. The jaw just slid back and forth side to side. And in one episode, Little Janice asked him about it. He asked why his mouth moves like that. And the skin taker doesn't look at her when he answers. He turns and looks dead into the camera, at you.

And he says, to grind your skin. That would be creepy enough for me to log off right there. But it's the next memory that's the real turning point, because up until now, they've been remembering characters. Now they're starting to remember an episode. Skyshale brings up something that they'd always assumed was a nightmare. A bad dream they had as a kid over and over, bad enough that they wet the bed. In this dream, the show's cheerful opening jingle ends.

The picture fades up from black, and all the characters are just there. with the camera cutting from face to face to face. And every single one of them is screaming. The puppets are flailing on their strings, thrashing all of them, shrieking at once. And Janice, the little girl, isn't acting. She's moaning and sobbing like she's been doing it for hours. The way SkyShill remembers it, this was just a nightmare that they used to have. Another user, Kevin underscore Hart, which is not the Kevin Hart that we all know, responds.

and he says, I don't think that that was a dream. I remember that. I remember it being an episode. SkyShill pushes back. No, no, that's not possible. There was no plot. It was literally just screaming for 30 minutes. And Kevin admits,

maybe I'm manufacturing the memory because you just described it. But I swear to God, I remember seeing exactly what you were describing. And then a third person, Jaron underscore 2005, confirms it too. He remembers Janus' shaking. He remembers the skin taker's jaw whipping back and forth so hard that he thought that it would fly off of his hinges. He remembers turning the TV off and being too scared to ever turn it back on.

So now you've got three different people who started out not being sure if this show even existed and now all confirming the most disturbing, the least plausible memory of all. An entire episode that was nothing but children's puppets screaming. And then come to the same. the last post. Mike, the same guy in the earlier thread who remembered the pirate at the cave, writes that he went to visit his mom. She's elderly living in a nursing home, and he asks her if she remembers him watching a kid's show called Candle Cove

when he was little back in the early 70s. And she said she's surprised that he remembers that at all, because she tells him what he actually used to do every time was announced that he was going to watch Candle Cove and then sit down in front of the television and turn it to static and watch dead air for half an hour. That's the end of the thread. That's the whole story. There was no show.

There was no laughing stock. No pirate Percy, no skin taker, no screaming episode. There was a little boy sitting cross-legged on the floor, perfectly content, watching 30 minutes of snow and static and somehow, his developing brain built an entire pirate adventure out of noise, and he wasn't the only kid doing it. A whole scattered group of children in the same corner of the country, in the same window of time, all stared into the same nothing, and all came away with the same show, the same pirate, the same skeleton, the same words, to grind your skin. And then, 35 years later, they found each other on the internet, and they reassembled it

together, never realizing that they were describing a program that never broadcasted, because it never existed. Now, here's where Candlecove does something that, as far as I know, no other creepy pasta has ever pulled off. Candlecove's writer, Chris Straub, said he got the idea after reading an old article in The Onion, with a headline about a grown adult who had occasional nightmares about Lidsville, a real genuinely strange puppet show from 1971. And that planted the seed. That specific dread of half-remembered low-budget kids' TV of the 70s. So Straw writes this thing. And he did it to imitate how collaborative internet folklore gets made,

a bunch of anonymous strangers building a myth together, post by post. And then the internet took Candle Cove and did exactly that to it. Within months, people were treating it like it was a real folktale. YouTubers started uploading fake footage of the show, grainy, screeching, fuzzed out clips claiming to be seen. salvaged episodes. People wrote their own first-person accounts of remembering Candle Cove as kids, extending the story as if it were a real shared memory. Fan artist drew the skin-taker, then the story spread to Forchan, to Reddit, to forum after forum, getting copied, tweaked,

added to, the authorship quietly falling away, until for a lot of people, it just became another anonymous piece of internet lore. In other words, a story about a false memory that a group builds together, became a real myth that a group built together. And to his enormous credit, Chris Straub mostly let it happen. He didn't go full lawyer about people stealing his story. He basically said that letting it mutate and spread serves the myth way more than him clamping down on it ever could, which is a pretty awesome thing for a creator to understand, that the most powerful thing he made wasn't the story. It was what happened to the story once it's loose. Once Candle Cove got popular enough, it did what only the very biggest creepypastas do.

It broke out of the internet entirely. In 2016, the sci-fi network launched a horror anthology series called Channel Zero, created by a writer named Nick Antoska. The whole concept of the show was that each season would adapt a different creepypasta into a full season of television, and the first one they picked was Candle Cove. The six-episode season premiered in October of 2016.

It's set in a small Ohio town where a child's psychologist comes home to face a string of unsolved killings, and of course Candle Cove is at the heart of it. All the characters from the show are there, the Pirates, the Laughingstock, Horace Horrible, and the Skin Taker himself. Although he gets reimagined as a monster

literally made out of teeth, there's even a main character named Mike Painter, a direct nod to Mike underscore Painter 65, one of the usernames from the original threat. It was a huge success. Channel Zero ran for four seasons on the strength of that first one, including one on No Endhouse, which I covered in an earlier episode. Interestingly, Chris Stroup himself wasn't involved in making the show.

The rights went to the network and they ran with their own version. But good news for fans of his work, he took the same instincts that made Candle Cove so successful and created a YouTube horror series called Local 58. It's basically the godfather of an entire genre that people now call analog horror. a scary story told through the format of old TV broadcasts, emergency signals, and public service announcements. So one anonymous-looking forum thread written by one guy in 2009 spun out into a hit cable series, a whole subgenre of internet horror, and a permanent place in the creepypasta

Hall of Fame. Not bad for a story where technically nothing happens except some people misremembering a TV show. I think what really makes Candle Cove work is the fact that it's something that literally happens to all of us. We haven't all been in the woods late at night or found ourselves alone in a house that might be haunted, but every single person out there has memories. Things were positive we remember with perfect clarity. And Candlecove forces us to admit that maybe our minds aren't that reliable after all. The haunted house is your memory, and there's no deadbolt for that. Every family has a story that's gotten a few new details with each retelling. Everybody's got that one childhood show or toy or place they can half see but can't quite prove.

Candlecove just takes that ordinary everyday experience and asks the one question that turns it into horror. What if you and everyone you knew remember something that was never there at all? That is the oldest kind of storytelling there is, by the way. Somebody sees something in the dark. They tell it around a fire. The next person sees a detail. Someone else swears they saw it too. And after enough time passes,

nobody can find the line between what actually happened and what got added afterwards. And a legend is born that everyone remembers, but no one really knows. Picture that little boy one more time. Sitting crisp cross on the carpet, late afternoon light streams through the window. He's completely happy, completely safe.

Staring into 30 minutes of static, and watching a nightmare play out on screen. Now think about the shows you remember from when you were little, the ones you can almost hear the theme song to, the ones you've never gone back and checked. How sure are you really that they were ever on? Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original.

I'd love to hear from you. Is there a show, a toy, a place from your childhood that you remember vividly, but can't find a single shred of proof that it ever existed? or have you and a sibling ever remembered the exact same thing that turned out never to have happened? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to support Twisted Tales

and get episodes a day early and ad-free, subscribe to CrimehousePlus. Go to CrimehousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcast, tap try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. 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 curious. And remember, there's no reason to fear the dart unless you try to hide from it. Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case,

the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.