Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Penpal: The Stalker Who Watched from the Beginning | Creepypastas

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

When Dathan was five, his kindergarten class released helium balloons with letters inside as a sweet lesson about connecting with strangers. But someone found his balloon... and never stopped watching him. For nearly a decade, this person photographed Dathan from the shadows, infiltrated his neighborhood, and ultimately targeted his best friend.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. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love Crimes of Reddit, a new crimehouse original with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Alexis Linkletter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers. Then they swap. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a threat at 2 a.m. that starts with, You have to see this.

Except Sabrina and Alexis. are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit Pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. A little boy wakes up in the middle of the woods in the dead of night. His feet are bleeding and he has no idea how he got there. There's a stack of photographs in his school folder. In the corner of every single one, so small you'd almost miss it, is a picture of him. But he never posed for any of them.

There's a note on his pillow that says he ran away and never wants to come home. But he knows that he didn't write it. Because whoever did got his name wrong. This isn't a story about a ghost or a monster or a demon. It's a story about a person. Someone real. Someone patient. And that's exactly what makes it so much worse.

Welcome to Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into humanity 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, tab 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 a creepypasta called Penpal. And out of everything I've ever covered on the show, this might be the one that sticks to me the most. It's the story of a man who spent almost his entire life trying to piece together his own childhood and slowly realizing that someone else was in every single memory.

Watching, waiting from the very beginning. Before I dive in, a heads up, This one goes to some genuinely dark places. We're going to be dealing with the abduction of a child, the death of a teenager, the death of a pet, and some very claustrophobic, intense imagery. So please keep that in mind as you listen. This story was posted on Reddit's No Sleep Forum back in 2011, in six separate parts by a user who went by 1,000 vultures. And the wild thing is it wasn't posted in order.

It jumps around in time because the narrator is recovering these memories as he, goes. So the way that you experience it is that you're solving the puzzle right alongside him. You get a piece and then another piece. And every new piece makes the last one so much worse. And I really want to stress this part. There's no monster here. Everything that happens in the story is something that could actually happen to a real kid in a real neighborhood. Keep that in the back of your mind the whole way through. Okay, a little bit of context because the way that this story was told is almost as important as the story itself. If you've ever gone down the no sleep rabbit hole, you know the one rule of that subreddit.

Everything is written as if it's completely true. No winking at the camera, no here's my scary story. The narrator talks to you like it happened to them, and you're expected to play along. So when this narrator starts out by apologizing for how long this is going to be and says he's finally going to try to explain something that happened to him when he was about six years old, it doesn't feel like fiction. It feels like a confession. And here's the structure that makes Pen Pal special.

He posts the first part and people in the comments start asking questions, little details, follow-ups, and those questions make him remember more. So he posts another part, which sparks more memories, which becomes another part, six times over. You're not reading a finished story. You're witnessing a man dig up his own past in real time. So let's start where he did at the beginning. We'll call him Dathan named after Pem Pell's writer. Dyson grows up with his mom, just the two of them,

in a modest little house in a neighborhood that's slowly changing. It's the kind of house that gets delivered on the back of a truck in two halves, and because of that, it sits up off the ground on blocks, which means there's a crawl space underneath, a dark, cramped, spidery gap between the floor of Dathan's bedroom and the dirt. The whole neighborhood is wrapped in thick woods, which is great during the day. He plays out there constantly.

Less great at night, though, when the trees turned into something else in a kid's imagination. And at night, in bed, Dathan hears footsteps, soft ones on carpet. In hindsight, he's pretty sure it was just his own heartbeat, thumping against the pillow. But as a kid, it terrified him. And every so often, he'd fall asleep on the top bunk and wake up on the bottom one. It's weird, but not scary weird. Kind of the thing that you'd shrug off. Until one night, he doesn't wake up on the bottom bunk.

Dathan wakes up because he's freezing cold, and when he opens his eyes, he's looking up at the stars. He's outside in the woods. He has no memory of walking there, no memory of anything. Right next to him is a deflated pool float, shaped like a shark, which is so specific and so surreal that it makes the whole thing feel more like a nightmare. But he's not asleep. He stands up and immediately a thorn stabs into his barefoot. The ground is covered in them. So now he's a six-year-old, alone, barefoot in the freezing dark, in the woods that he doesn't recognize. And all he can do is pick a direction and walk. For what feels like hours, Dathan pushes through the bush trying not to cry or call out,

because some instinct tells him that he does not want to be found by whatever might be out there. And then he sees something that just guts him. It's the deflated pool float. He's walked in a giant circle. He's right back where he started. Dathan finally spots the brightest star in the sky, decides that's north and follows it. And slowly, things start looking familiar. He finds a dirt ditch he and his friends play in.

He knows where he is now. He can see the roof of his house. He's so relieved he starts to run. And then he sees it. Every light in the house is on. His mom is up. He's going to have to explain this and he has no idea how. His hand closes on the doorknob and two arms wrap around him from

behind and rips him backwards. He screams. He screams for his mom as loud as his throat will let him, kicking, thrashing, because he was right there, one inch from home and something pulled him back into the dark. The door opens, and it's a man. He's enormous blocking out the Porsche light, and it's a police officer. The arms holding him are his mothers. She grabbed him because she was terrified he was going to run again. Dathan is safe. Everyone is crying. But then his mom slides a piece of paper across the table. The police found it on his pillow that night. It's a runaway note.

It says he's unhappy and he never wants to see his mother or his friends again. Dathan stares at it. And the only thing his six-year-old brain can land on, the one thing he knows for sure is that the name signed at the bottom is spelled wrong. He never spells his own name wrong. He didn't write this note. Someone got into Dathan's room. Someone wrote a note protected.

to be him and got his name wrong, which means they didn't know him as well as they wanted everyone to think. Someone picked up a sleeping six-year-old, carried him out into the woods, and left him there on purpose. Okay, so right out of the gate, this story does something so smart. That whole opening, the footsteps, waking up on the bottom bunk, he hands you the innocent explanation first. It's your heartbeat. You got up to get water and forgot. And you as the listener are nodding along explaining it away, until the woods. And then you realize you've been doing the exact same thing this kid did his whole childhood, taking yourself out of the obvious. The runaway note is what flips it from creepy to sinister. Sleepwalking doesn't leave a note.

A note means intention. It means a person sat in this child's bedroom at his little desk and calmly composed a lie. And the misspelled name, I can't stop thinking. about it. That's the detail that tells you this person is watching from the outside. Close enough to know that Dathan exists to know his name to want him, but not close enough to know how it's spelled yet. So the first post blows up. And in the comments, people are asking questions. Dathan says that he called his mom to ask about his childhood and she got so exasperated that she basically snapped. Why don't you just tell them about the balloons? And the second he heard the word balloons, a whole part of his childhood he completely forgot about came flooding back.

When Dathan is five, in kindergarten, his class does this project. Maybe you did a version of it as a kid. Every student writes a little letter introducing themselves, seals it with an envelope, ties the envelope to a helium balloon, and lets it go. The idea is that a stranger somewhere out there finds your balloon and writes you back. It's a lesson about community, about making safe contact with the wider world. Dathan puts real effort into this. He writes about the stuff that he loves, exploring, building forts, and swimming.

His teacher takes a polaroid of each kid holding their balloon and tucks it in the embalome. And in his, Dathan adds a dollar bill for the postage to write him back and writes across the front of it in big, proud letter, for stamps. Over the next few weeks, the replies roll in. Postcards, photos of far-off cities pinned up on a big map in the classroom

so the kids can see how far their balloons traveled. Dathan's comes last, and when it finally arrives, it's not a letter. It's a single blurry Polaroid, just a smear of what might be desert. No return address, so he can't even write back. Then another photo shows up for him. Then another.

And another. While his best friend Josh takes home maybe four photos for the whole project, he takes home close to 50. Dathan gets bored of them, honestly. He stuffs them in a drawer with his rocks and his baseball cards and forgets about them. Then that summer, he and Josh set up a snow cone stand. And one afternoon, counting their crumpled dollar bills, Dayton Freezes.

Because there, in his stack of change, is a dollar with something written across the front. For stamps. It's the exact dollar he sent up on his balloon. It made its way through who knows how many hands and came. all the way back to him. And as a kid, that feels like magic. The world feels small and warm and connected, which is the whole point of the balloon project, right?

That night, Dathan pulls all 50 of those forgotten Polaroids out of the drawer and lays them out on his bedroom floor in a neat grid in the order that he got them. And he notices something. They get clearer as they go. The first ones are blurry nothing, but gradually they sharpen, a tree, a street sign. a group of people walking into a building.

And in that photo of the group of people, he sees himself in the very back of the crowd holding his mother's hand. He doesn't understand. Why is he in the picture? Then his eyes move across the grid, and his stomach drops, because he's in the next one too, and the next, off to the side in the background. Just the edge of his face at the corner of the frame. He's in every single photo.

50 photographs mailed to a kindergarten over the course of a school year, and in all 50 of them from a distance, without him ever knowing, someone was photographing him. He's frozen on the floor with this feeling, not even fear yet, more like the sick feeling of being in trouble when his mom comes in from getting the mail. He tries to show her the photos. She's half-listening, sorting envelopes,

and then she goes completely silent. He hears her breathing change, she's trying to pull air out of a room that doesn't have any. She drops the mail and runs for the phone. And while she's frantically calling the police, he's fidgeting with the mail she dropped and slides one more polaroid out of an envelope. One he's never seen.

It's him, but it's close up this time. And he's not alone. His friend Josh is in it too. It's the two of them in the woods from yesterday. Dathan asked his mom why she's calling the police. and she holds up that last envelope the color draining out of her face and tells him it's because there's no postmark. These weren't mailed, not the ones from yesterday and maybe not any of them.

Someone was hand-delivering photographs of this child, someone who's been close enough to take a picture of him and his best friend in the woods the day before and then walk it right up to his family's mailbox. The dollar. On the surface, it's this sweet, magical, small world moment. Your dollar comes home. And it takes a second beat to realize what this actually means.

Whoever has been sending these photos wanted him to know they'd been there the whole time. It's the difference between a stranger found your balloon and the person who found your balloon has been standing behind you for a year. And the 50 versus 4 thing is such a chilling little piece of math. Every other kid's pen pal wrote back a couple of times and lost interest, because that's what normal people do. Dathan's pen pal never lost interest, and it turned into an obsession.

There's no postmark. That is one of the best gut-punch lines I've ever encountered in internet horror, and it's just a fact about an envelope. It reframes everything. The mail wasn't coming from far away. It was coming from right outside the door. So now we're on the third part, and this is the one that made me put my phone down and walk around my apartment for a minute. To understand it, you need one more piece of background. Around the time that Dayton starts kindergarten, he breaks his arm falling out of a tree.

To cheer him up, his mom brings home a kitten. And the very first thing this kitten does is climb into an empty soda box on the floor. So he names this cat Boxes. Boxes is an indoor cat, but he's an escape. artist, and his favorite move is to bolt under the house into that crawl space. Getting him back out is a nightmare, so Dathan's mom comes up with this genius trick. She runs an electric can opener on an extension cord out to the crawl space opening. Boxes learned that the sound of the can opener means tuna, so he comes running every time.

Now, at the end of first grade, Dathan and his mom suddenly move across the city. His mom had told him that they had another week. then one day it's just, we're leaving today. She says it's easier to replace stuff than to pack it, so they leave things behind. Deacin doesn't even get the box of his own clothes out of his closet. He and Josh stay best friends, though, even across town. Their parents drive them back and forth for sleepovers. One Christmas, the parents chip in and get the boys a pair of walkie-talkies,

the kind that supposedly works over long distances so they can talk between houses. The boys love them. They do the whole mock radio, over and out movie voice. And then when he's 10, boxes goes missing. Days pass and he doesn't turn up. And Dathan has this thought that just detonates in his head. What if boxes went home?

Not their current house, the old one across the city. Animals do that, right? They go back to where they came from. He can't drive there, he's 10, but he can sneak out. So one night during a sleepover, Dathan convinces Josh and the two of them slip out Josh's wind and head for the old neighborhood through the woods because that's faster. He doesn't tell Josh that these are the same woods that he once woke up in, though.

When they get there, the old house is abandoned. It's dark, overgrown, and falling apart. Nathan's mom had told him a new family lived there and they couldn't bother them. That was a lie. He and Josh decide one of them has to go under the house, into the crawl space to look for boxes while the others stays by the opening. They rock paper scissors for it. Dathan loses.

So he wriggles the panel loose and crawls into the dark with a flashlight and his walkie-talkie. And immediately he's hit with the smell. A thick, rotting, dead thing smell. He radios Josh panicking sure that it's the cat. He inches forward, reaches for a support beam, and his fingers touch fur. He braces himself for the worst, and it's a dead raccoon. not boxes. He almost laughs with relief. Meanwhile, Josh decides to go check inside the actual house. Over the walkie, they keep up the goofy radio bit. And then Josh finds Dathan's old bedroom.

And Josh says, hey, your clothes aren't in boxes. They're hung up in the closet. Which is impossible because Dathan packed those clothes himself. Someone hooked them out of the boxes and hung them up. Then Josh's voice again, kind of laughing, kind of confused. Dude, your walls are covered in pictures of you, hundreds of them. And then Josh goes quiet. When he comes back on the walkie, his voice is completely different. It's hushed and shaking. He whispers, there's someone in the house.

And now Dathan, still in the crawl space, is listening through the walkie to heavy, dragged footsteps above him, dirt raining down his face. There's a loud sud. Josh whispers that the man is carrying a big bag, and the bag just moved. In pure animal terror, Dathan turns his flashlight and sweeps the crawl space, and he sees them.

Dozens of dead animals piled around the edge of the space and near him a filthy blanket surrounded by bowls, one still holding cat food. Someone has been living down here. Dathan scrambles for the exit panel, but it won't budge. It's wet shut from the outside. He's trapped under the house while heavy footsteps thunder back and forth above him, and he can hear Josh screaming.

Then the panel gets torn away, and it's Josh dragging him out. They run. They jump the fence, they tear through the woods, and the whole way Josh is screaming that the man took his picture. But Dathan already knows the man had Josh's picture. From years earlier, that day at the ditch, when they heard a weird mechanical clicking in the trees and Josh joked that it was just a robot. It was a camera.

They make it back to Josh's house alive. And later back home, Dathan hears the sweetest sound in the world, boxes, meowing from under his bed. He drops to the floor laughing, thinking about how he just crawled under an entire house looking for this cat. He shoves a shirt aside to find him. and the meowing is coming from his walkie-talkie. Josh had dropped his walkie at the old house, and now the cat's cries are coming through it. Boxes never came home.

Later, in present day, Dason's mother confirms the worst of it. She tells him, I never put a blanket or bowls under that house. She found that little nest herself that last day when she crawled under to grab the cat. That's why she packed them up and moved in a single afternoon,

two weeks early without a word. She knew, and she kept it from Dathan for his entire childhood, hoping that he'd never have to find out. And it keeps going, because a comment on that post jogs another memory, the map story. There's an old woman in the neighborhood, Miss Maggie, sweet, elderly, always in floral dresses. She loves to invite Dathan and Josh in for snacks when they swim in the lake,

and the boys always politely say no, because there's just something a little off about her. We find out Maggie has Alzheimer's. She's mostly alone. Her husband Tom died years ago, but she doesn't remember that, and she thinks that he's a way on business. She calls the boys by the wrong names,

Chris and John, the names of her grown-up sons who never visit. His mom gently coaches him. Be kind to her, but never go inside. Always say no. Here's the one genuinely beautiful image in this whole story. Miss Maggie's sprinkler timer is broken, so it runs all hours, even freezing during winter nights. So on cold mornings, her entire yard is transformed into this glittering ice palace.

Every branch and leaf coated in it, catching the sunrise. The boys love to play in it. Now that summer, Dathan and Josh have a project. They want to prove that the creek by Josh's house connects to the lake by Dathens. So they're making maps. And to explore the deeper water, they build a raft out of the snow. scrap styrofoam and rope from a construction site. Then one winter night, Dathan's mom gets called into work. As she heads out, she's looking him dead in the eye and says, stay put. The boys

immediately take the raft out. They paddle past the edge of everything they've mapped into the deep black water way further than they should. And as they go, they start learning something in the woods keeping pace with them. So because their little kids trying to be brave, they start mocking it, calling out hello in silly cartoon voices, cracking each other up. And then from the darkness just off the edge of the map, something answers. Hello. The voice is quiet, forced, like it's being pushed out of the last of someone's breath, but not sick, just wrong.

Dathan lights one of the fireworks he brought and fires it into the trees to see, green light, red light bursting over the water. He doesn't see anything. and then whatever it is starts running at them through the woods. In their panic, Dathan and Josh thrashes around. The raft comes apart and they lose the map to the water. They barely drag themselves back to shore, soaked and freezing. Dathan's shirt had gone missing, so he goes back along the bank to look for it

and runs into Miss Maggie, out in the freezing dark. She looks frail and strange without her usual smile. He jokes asking if she's going to invite him in for snack. And for the first time ever, she says, maybe another time. Dathan doesn't think much of it. He's too cold and too worried about getting home. But when he checks his pockets, there's a folded piece of paper he doesn't recognize. He opens it.

It's a child's drawing. Inside a big oval, there's two stick figures holding hands, one large, one small. Neither has a face. And a number written in the corner, maybe 15, maybe 16. and next to the small figure are Dacin's initials. He didn't draw it. He doesn't know how it got in his pocket. And here's what he understands only now as an adult.

A few weeks after that night, men in orange hazmat suits carried black bags out of Miss Maggie's house. The whole streets smelled like death. They boarded the place up. Miss Maggie had told him that night that her husband Tom finally came home. He knows now who really, really moved in with her, and he knows why he never once saw Miss Maggie's body carried out on a stretcher. The bags weren't full of garbage. The boxes never came home revealed genuinely

broke me, because your brain does the exact thing that his brain does. You hear the cat, you feel the relief, and you exhale. And then the meowing is coming from the walkie-talkie, which means the man in that house has the walkie, which means that he was close enough to the cat to record it and send those sounds back to the kid's bedroom on purpose. It's cruelty as a love letter. He wants Dason to hope, and then he wanted to take it away. The drawing with a number in the corner is the detail that keeps me up, because think about what that number in the corner of the drawing means. Fifteen, sixteen of what? Encounters, drawings, times he got close. This person is keeping a tally. And Miss Maggie is where the story doesn't.

something almost unbearably sad. She spent her last months lonely, confused, seeing her dead sons in two neighborhood boys, and the thing that finally came to keep her company, that she welcomed in because she thought that it was her husband, was the worst thing imaginable. Now, if you're somehow holding it together right now, the last part is where it all comes due.

We're jumping forward now. Dathan is 15. Quick thread to pick up first, though. Way back in first grade, after a brutal stretch, he had the stomach flu, then pink eye, then he got bullied, and ended up eating lunch alone in a bathroom stall. After that, a much bigger third grader named Alex started sitting with Dathan, and the bullying just stopped. Turns out, Alex had a crush on Josh's older sister Veronica and figured being nice to her

brother's best friend might help his case. Now cut to Dathan at 15. He's at a rundown second. and run movie theater, his friends called The Dirt Theater, think cheap tickets and midnight cult movies. A group of girls walks in. One of them stops him cold. It's Veronica all grown up. They reconnect. She's sweet, she's funny, and she's recently single. They make a loose plan to meet at the next midnight movie. Thayton is completely hopelessly smitten. He asked his mom to drive him. The second he mentions is to see Veronica, her whole face changes and she says no.

So Dathan sets it up to walk from a friend's house instead. Walking there at night, a car pulls up behind him and just stops. Headlights blinding him. It sits there. Then it slowly rolls forward and passes him. In the dark, Dathan catches one detail, a big crack across the back window. He shrugs it off as someone just trying to spook him for fun. Dathan meets up with Veronica.

It basically becomes a date. afterward they wander around the dead, shuttered mall attached to the theater talking. He clocks that the cracked window car is in the lot. Then later, it's gone. Before Veronica drives him home, Dathan ducks behind the theater to peeve, hopping a chain-link fence out of her sight for just a second. And that's when he hears it. An engine, getting louder, no closer.

Then a short cut-off scream and a heavy, sickening thud. Dathan runs, trips, and smacks his head on the pavement. He scrambles up and climbs back over the fence. Veronica's car is the only one in the lot. He comes around it, and he finds her. She's badly hurt, but she's alive. Dathan's phone has no signal, so he takes hers, calls 911, and stays with her, telling Veronica she's going to be okay, hitting himself a little bit for lying every time he says it.

And through her broken jaw, she whispers something he barely understands. she says he took my picture. Veronica survives the surgery, although her jaw is wired shut, and most of her body is in a cast. She texts Dathan not to visit. She doesn't want him to see her like that. So instead, they text. Every single day for weeks, and it turns into something real.

One day, she texts him, I love you. He says it back. Veronica keeps promising she'll come to the next midnight movie, but she never shows. Instead, a man was saying, something wrong about the way he's breathing sits down in the seat Dathan saved for her. Her final text to him just says, see you again soon. Dathan is frantic.

He tells his mom that he hasn't heard from Veronica in days, and his mom looks at him like his mind just snapped. And then, very gently, she tells him the truth. Veronica died weeks ago. She died on the last day he visited her in the hospital. He's been texting a dead girl for weeks. Here's what happened. When Veronica was hit, her phone vanished.

It was never in her belongings. Her family only found out that it was still active when the phone company called about a massive charge. Hundreds of picture messages sent from Veronica's phone. After the night that she died. All of them sent to one phone number, Dathan's number, photos he never saw because his cheap old phone couldn't receive picture messages at all.

He tried very hard not to think about what was in Do's photos, but he can't stop himself from wondering one thing, whether he would have been in them. And now the last part, the one that ties every single thread together, it opens with a flashback to the first day of kindergarten. Dathan embarrassed about his broken arm and his cast is alone at a lunch table when a kid sits down across from him and says, I like your lunchbox.

He assumes he's being made fun of, until he looks up and sees that the kid has the exact same lunchbox. They both love the same cartoon. The kid knocks his milk into his own lap and they both crack up. Dathan asked him to sign his cast. The kid's name is Josh. That's how the best friendship of his life started, and there's this detail that his mom used to joke about,

that the only way she could tell the two boys apart was their hair. Josh had straight, dirty blonde hair, like his sister Veronica. Dathan had this dark curly hair like his mom. Their friendship starts to fade after the night they snuck into the old house. Josh stops wanting to come around. At Dathan's 12th birthday party, Josh shows up, and he's quiet, almost sad. When Dathan asks what happened between them, Josh just says, you left. During presents, there's a card in the pile with no name on it, just a plain, single grubby floral card.

Inside, there's no handwritten message, just the words already. printed in it. I love you. Circled a few times in pencil. Everyone laughs, assuming it's a joke from one of the kids. Then Nathan opens his mom's gift. It's a brand new set of walkie-talkies. She thought the old pair broke and she knew the boys used to love them. Josh goes white. He gets up, walks to the kitchen and calls his dad to come get him early. On his way out the door, Josh apologizes for being a downer. He says he's just tired and he hasn't been sleeping well, that he thinks he's been sleepwalking, and then he waves goodbye. That is the last time Dathan ever sees his best friend. A couple of months later, Josh is gone,

vanished. His parents find a note on his pillow that he ran away. Now the truth. Dathan's mother finally tells him the rest. After Josh disappeared, his family came apart. Then Veronica died. His mother lost her grip on reality entirely, wandering the old neighborhood at. at night calling for both her missing children. So Josh's dad starts taking whatever local construction work he could to stay close to home. And he got hired to level a newly cleared lot, right by that creek the boys used to raft on. Three days in, he hits a spot he can't flatten. It keeps sinking, so he digs. Three feet down, his shovel hits something hard, then punches through it.

He widens the hole. After half an hour, he's standing on top of a box, seven feet long, wrapped in a brown blanket. It's a coffin. And Josh is inside. He's dead, but not long dead. And on top of Josh, there's a large man, also dead. Their legs are tangled together. One of the man's arms is wrapped under the boy's neck pulling him close. Josh's hair had been dyed dark brown. His clothes were far too small because they were Dathan's old clothes, the ones left hanging in that closet. There's a bottle of ether in the box, and pinned to Josh's shirt is a photograph. It's of Dathan, as a child. There's a terrible injury on the man's neck, a chunk torn away. Josh had bitten through the man's neck trying to get free, and the man died down there in that

box. But Josh, small, trapped, pinned under a grown man's body, couldn't get out from under him. which means when they were put in the ground and buried, they were alive. And there's one more piece, the worst piece. Josh's father tells Dason's mother that about a month before, a stranger had approached him at another work site. He'd offered Josh's dad $100 to fill in some holes a kid had dug on his property. The man just asked him to wait until 5 p.m. the next day, so he could take some photos for insurance first.

Josh's dad needed the money so he didn't. took the job. He filled in the holes, then forgot about it. Until the day he pulled that same man off his son, the man paid Josh's own father $100 to bury him alive with the boy. And in Josh's pocket, they find a folded piece of paper. It's the map, their map, the one from all those years ago. Josh had been finishing it. It was going to be a birthday present for his best friend. Dathan's mother says that the man's face twisted in death wasn't twisted into some monster's snarl. It was calm, peaceful. The corners of his mouth were even turned up, just slightly.

He was smiling. Not the grin of a movie villain, the smile of contentment, of satisfaction. To him, it was a smile of love. I think that they were alive is the single. most devastating turn I have come across in a horror story. The whole thing has just been building this dread and you brace for a body, a monster, or a reveal. Instead, the horror is a piece of grim logic. The wound on the neck means the man died first and the boy couldn't move him. And therefore, they went into the ground breathing. Your own brain assembles it the same way that

Dathan's mother did. Nobody has to say it out loud. And the hundred dollars, God. The fact that the man's final act was to manipulate Josh's own father into being the one to bury him, that's not just cruel. That is a horrible punchline. The detail that actually makes me the saddest, though, isn't the coffin. It's the map in Josh's pocket, because it tells you that Josh wasn't just a victim in his last stretch of life. He was still Josh, still thinking about his friend, still working on a present.

That's the human being inside all of this horror. and the story never lets you forget him. So let's step back and get into the background of the story. Penpal was written by a man named Dathan Auerbach. He posted it on Reddit's No Sleep Forum part by part under the username 1000 Vultures. Starting on September 8th, 2011, the story got so much love that he expanded and wrote the whole thing into a novel called Penpal in 2012. For me, the format really makes it. Remember, Dathan, the real one, didn't post it.

this in order. He posted it as fragments, out of sequence, framed as memories that he was recovering because people in the comments kept asking questions. So the original readers weren't handed a finished story. They were handed a puzzle, one piece at a time, and they solved it in real time together. And the order you learn things is the entire trick. You always understand the innocent version of a memory first, the balloon project, the lost cat, the sweet old neighbor. And only later you learn the second meaning. You're always one beat behind the truth, exactly like the fictional Dathan was.

And because of No Sleep's whole rule that everything is written as if it's real, it never reads like a scary story. It reads like a man's testimony, like someone working up the courage to tell you the worst thing that's ever happened to them. There's no ghost, no demon, no cursed object.

There's only a person. Someone who saw a child's balloon drift down out of the sky, decided that child belonged to him and was willing to spend years quietly taking photographs from the edge of the frame. The horror isn't a creature. It's a completely ordinary childhood

seen through another lens. And underneath all of it, there are two kinds of love in the story pulling against each other. There's a mother who spent her son's entire life building walls to keep a truth away from him and who has to live with the fact that the walls were never going to be enough. And there's another thing, the thing in the crawl space, that thought what it felt was love too.

In the end, Pempal is about how the things that are supposed to keep us safe, a school project designed to connect us to a stranger, a parent's protection, our own memory, can all be turned into the exact opposite. It's widely considered one of the best things ever posted in that entire community. The novel became a genuine cult favorite, and it helped prove that internet horror written by some anonymous person on a forum could actually be literature. In the end, after everything, the fictional Dathan says the thing he holds onto isn't the horror. It's the simplest memory he has, that before any of it, he and Josh were just two kids who

explored the woods together, who built rafts, who made maps, who were, for a few short years, the best of friends. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a crimehouse original. I'd love to hear from you. Have you ever recovered a memory from childhood that suddenly, in hindsight, felt completely different? Or found an old photo of yourself and had no idea who took it? 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 Crimehouse Plus. To join, go to CrimehousePlus.com. And 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 dark unless you try to hide from it. I'm Lindsay Cormack, host of Government That Doesn't Suck with Greg Jackson from History That Doesn't Suck, a narrative history podcast about the American institutions that you'll never look at the same way again.

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