Scary Horror Stories by Dr. NoSleep - My Father's Secret

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

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I'd like to thank my newest supporters, Kaylee, White Reaper, and April. If you'd like to listen to the show Ad Free and receive bonus episodes, consider becoming a patron. It is only $5 a month, and you can cancel any time. The link is in the description below. I first discovered my father's secret when I was 11 years old. It was a hot, windy summer night, and for some reason I just couldn't sleep. The painful dryness of my throat, forced me out of bed for a glass of water, but I was careful to tiptoe down the hall.

To my right was my parents' room. Both were high-achieving workaholics, who would ground me for a week if they got me sneaking around at night. To my left was my baby brother Eric's room, and if he woke up, we'd all be listening to his shrieks until morning. After navigating the minefield of creaky spots on the hallway floor, I chugged a glass of cool water and turned to go back to bed. And that was when I noticed a dim light at the bottom of the stairs. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen. But who would be down there so late at night?

Against my better judgment, I crept slowly down the stairs. Familiar places seemed different at night. Sound carries, distances stretch and contract, and shadows seem more dangerous than they do in the daylight. As I peered around the corner of the living room wall, I wasn't entirely sure that I'd ever really woken up. Maybe I was still back in my bed, and the freakish scene before my eyes was a nightmare. My father stood in his boxers before the open refrigerator, like a cultist, worshipping an idol. Food items of every imaginable type were spread out across the tile floor, like burnt offerings.

Tupperware's full of salad, entire pots of food. vanilla pudding, canned spaghetti, gravy, raw steak, and much more. To my amazement in horror, my father, who normally counted his calories and lectured us about the importance of healthy eating, began shoving fistfuls of it into his mouth. The vileness of the mixtures that dribbled from his hands didn't seem to matter. In fact, he almost seemed to relish the most sickening combinations. Chocolate cake with an entire jar of mustard, uncooked chicken breasts wrapped in banana peels, Gorganzola cheese, coffee grounds, and a cherry popsicle. My father shoveled handful of disgusting slop down his throat with grunts of satisfaction. When it was all done, he sat

on the cool tile floor, chewing on wrappers and plastic as he scanned the darkened kitchen, for more things to eat. His normally kind blue eyes looked black and piggish. And I shivered at the thought of what might happen if that hungry gaze landed on me. I backed away and crawled up the stairs as quietly as I could,

being more careful than ever not to make a single sound. It was all too easy to imagine the sudden squeak, followed by my father charging on all fours through the dark, searching for me with those beady, animal eyes. His wide-open mouth, filthy with potato peels, soy sauce, and raw flour, would sink into the back of my leg. He'd grunt and gurgle with glee as he ate. Once, safely back in bed, I lay awake for a long time, listening. Hoping that when and if my father came back to bed,

he would walk up the stairs on two legs. Hours later, I woke to the sound of knuckles hitting wood. breakfast is ready champ my father stood in my bedroom doorway grinning his eyes were blue and kind just as I remembered his physique was sleek and fit like always and his clean shaven face smelled of aftershave and mouthwash he laughed when he saw my groggy expression looks like someone had a rough night I'll see you downstairs all right buddy I gotta go make sure your mother doesn't burn the pancakes with that my father my perfectly normal father was on his way back downstairs. Had it all just been a bad dream? I would have been happy to believe it, but as my father walked away, I spotted a wrinkled,

greasy lettuce leaf stuck to the bottom of his bare foot. The next night, I forced myself to stay up late on purpose. Although I never heard my father get out of bed, the light was on downstairs at around 2 a.m. I went far enough down the stairs to hear the gnashing and gurgling sounds coming from the kitchen back with a shudder. I was repulsed by my father's freakish nighttime feasts, but strangely fascinated by them as well. They explained so many things that it seemed odd to me before, the way my father always came home from work, with fresh bags of groceries every day, for example. Or my mother's strict rules about being out of bed at night. Did she know? Or was it a subconscious instinct, warning her to protect her children from what her husband became at night?

When I looked at my father, however, I couldn't help but wonder where it all went. At 46, he still had the body of an athlete. Was this how he fueled his endless days of work, exercise, and socializing? Or did he just puk it all up at some point. Maybe the whole thing was just a weird form of sleepwalking. I'd read about sleepwalking for the first time in fourth grade, and it had terrified me ever since. After the third night, I stopped spying on my father. It felt wrong and dangerous, too. On my way up the stairs the last time, I woke up my baby brother Eric. Miraculously, he'd only cooed and gurgled a little before falling back asleep. Nevertheless, I breathed a sigh of relief when my father left for a week-long business trip.

When he came home, his late-night feasts stopped for a while. But the year I turned 14, they returned with a vengeance. One night I snuck out with some friends to smoke and drink by the railroad tracks behind my neighborhood. As I slipped back into the house with a spare key, I didn't even think about what my father might be doing at this late hour. But the foul smell inside the house reminded me. Unable to restrain my curiosity, I snuck down the hallway toward the kitchen. It looked like a hurricane had passed through. Cabinets were flung open, frozen peas covered the floor,

and my father was on all fours with his head inside the trash can. We threw everything in there, dead leaves, dog feces, dirty paper towels, and my father was devouring it all. I covered my mouth to block out the stench and crept upstairs to my bedroom. Previously, my father had been able to keep the noise, smell, and filth to a minimum, or at least get it cleaned up by morning. But during that awful autumn, his late-night hunger grew worse and worse. The slamming of cabinets even woke Eric. Three years old now and already adventurous, he wanted to go investigate. I had to press a finger to my mouth and lay with him until he fell back asleep.

The chaos also set our golden retriever, Max, into barking fits that could last for hours. Until one night, they stopped forever. Max was usually the first one to the breakfast table in the morning, eager for the pieces of cereal, or egg that Eric inevitably spilled all over the floor. Yet one rainy morning at the beginning of November, he wasn't in his usual place beside Eric's high chair. My father sat at the kitchen table, staring blankly into a mug of black coffee.

When Eric and my mother finally joined us at the table, he broke the bad news. I'm sorry, kids. Max ran away last night. I'm going to go around the neighborhood today and put up posters. but I found his collar torn off, and it doesn't look good. After a long silence, Eric ran wailing to his room. My mother shot a hateful glare at my father before following him,

leaving the two of us alone at the table. If you'd like to help with the posters, my father began. No, that's fine. I pushed my omelet around my plate with my fork and tried to hold down the sick feeling in my stomach. I don't think it would do much good, anyway. On my way home from school that afternoon, and in the weeks that followed, I saw a lot of flyers for missing animals stuck to telephone poles and streetlights. Only a few of them were from

Max. Our neighbor's cat, Miffy, and Conan, the husky at the end of the road, all had posters up for them. But pet disappearances weren't the worst thing to happen in our neighborhood that fall. Christy Pell, an attractive young woman who lived a few houses down from us, liked to go for long runs before sunrise. One morning, she never made it back home. Although our parents did their best to hide the grisly details, soon every teenager in the neighborhood knew exactly what had happened to Christy. The 7 a.m. garbage crew had found the naked upper half of Christy's body

at the end of a gruesome smear on the sidewalk. Her lower half, her stomach, and most of her intestines were missing. Police weren't sure whether Christy had died of blunt force trauma or bled to death from the thousands of scratch marks gouged into her skin. Lazzang sur-gillet, puissance-moleaned for 15 minutes. We're like it's their dojo. Pre-to-joo?

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A curfew was put into place. The school called a special assembly. And when I got home from school that day, my mother had installed new locks on all the doors and windows. The era of midnight excursions to the railroad with my friends had come to an end. And so did the attacks. Soon after, animal control trapped and killed a coyote that had traces of Christie's organs in its stomach. As far as the authorities were concerned, the mystery of Christy's death and the wave of pet disappearances had been resolved. But I knew better.

After Christy's death, however, the attack stopped, and I didn't think about them again until the day I left for college. As I loaded my stuff into my second-hand Honda Civic beneath the blazing August sun, I couldn't help but feel the chill of foreboding when I looked back at my family home. It had been almost four years since the last time I'd caught my father snacking at night.

But what if his bizarre hunger went in cycles? And what if it got worse with each cycle? I smiled as I honked and waved goodbye to my family, but I realized that I didn't like the idea of leaving Eric alone with my father. I knew that there was another side to him, a side without those perfectly white teeth or that gentle demeanor.

There was a side of him that rooted ravenously around in the dark for food, a side of him that was insatiable, a side of him that would eat. With one last nervous look at Eric, I backed out of the driveway and set off on the grueling six-hour drive to my new university home.

With the windows down, and my favorite music blaring from the radio. I remember feeling especially free, like a dark and heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. My future felt bright, but not even a year went by before the past caught up to me. 11.02 p.m. on December 3, 2013. I'll remember the date and time until the day I die.

My roommate was out with his girlfriend, and I had just finished submitting a paper that was do at midnight that same day. Proud of myself, I leaned back in my chair and reached for my phone to see if any of my friends were free that evening. There was a knock at my door. My mother was the last person I expected to see, but there she was, standing in the hallway of my grungy dorm in an eloquent red trench coat that dripped sleet onto the carpet. There were dark circles under her eyes and her cheeks were puffy. Speechless. I shuffled her inside. I shuffled her inside. and made a half-hearted attempt to clean my room at the same time.

She sat in my chair, and I sat down on my bed. Honey, your father and I are splitting up. My mother said in one breath. But I don't want you to worry about that now. I want you to stay focused on your studies and know that I'll always be here to support you. I barely heard her. I was only concerned about one thing.

Who will Eric be living with? I asked, as nonchalantly as I could, but my mother stayed. silent. Ma, I repeated, what about Eric? My mother burst into tears. As the story of my little brother's disappearance made the news, I faced a daily outpouring of sympathy on my walk across campus. People I'd barely spoken to wanted to hug me. My professors sent me emails of condolence. Memories of Eric were played in my head, along with the sick certainty that I knew exactly what had happened to him, and why the police would never find my little brother's remains.

The second part of my conversation with my mother on that snowy December night still lingered in my ears. Mom, I forced myself to come right out and say it. Are the police going to investigate, dad? My mother gave me a long, hard look, as if to gauge how much I knew, then shook her head. Your father and I have already been cleared of all charges. My mother's voice sounded bitter. But, honey, I'm not sure it's safe for either of us to be around him after this. You know what I mean, don't you? I nodded. I've already talked to the university, and they're willing to transfer you to a different dorm.

You can stay with me over the holidays, but I hope you understand when I ask you not to share either address with your father. I understood perfectly. For the next five years, I went off the grid for my father. I didn't know where my father was or what he was doing, and I didn't care. But a month before I graduated from my master's program, I listened to the thesis presentation of a friend and the criminology department, who was developing a program to link killers to victims by tracking their flights. I immediately thought of my father's business trips.

And when my friend ran his full name through his system, it returned a multitude of disappearances that coincided with, with each of his trips. Unfortunately, my friend informed me. The cities he'd visited experienced dozens of missing persons cases each week. The proof I'd uncovered was useless. I did, however, learned one useful fact for my friend's system. My father had no registered address, but he did own a PO box and a remote patch of land in the southeastern corner of the state. When I pulled up the coordinates on Google Earth, I saw what could easily be a small cabin hidden among the trees at the end of a winding dirt track.

I felt a pang of sadness for what had happened to my family. How could a man as hardworking and successful as my father have wound up living in such a place? Before I opened a new chapter in my life at graduation, I needed to close the last one. I needed to confront my father. It was a long drive to the address my friend had given me. My gas meter crept lower and lower, but all I saw were more pine trees. My father had truly moved as far away from civilization as he could get, and I couldn't help but wonder how he fed his hunger all the way out here.

I finally pulled to a stop at a dirt pull-off with a rusty gate blocking further passage. If I hadn't been looking for it, I would have missed it. As I hopped at the gate and proceeded down the dirt track, I spotted a familiar pickup truck hidden behind the trees. My father was here. I'd walked about a mile when rain began to fall from the storm clouds overhead, turning the dirt track into a muddy clay suit. I suddenly doubted my decision to come all the way out here, alone, without telling anyone where I'd gone. When I was a child, my father had always been... himself during the day. But what if that was no longer the case? Up ahead, a half-buried deer skull

sneered at my predicament. It was a long three miles to my father's cabin, but I recognized the simple, two-story wooden structure right away. The cabin showed all the care and dedication that my father put into everything he did. Even though he'd clearly built it himself, it looked good enough to be a rental. I knocked on the door, hoping that when it opened, I wouldn't see a pair of beady black eyes glittering, drooling, ravenous mouth. Well, this is a surprise. My father smiled when he answered the door. Before I could stop him, he wrapped me in a tight bear hug and pulled me inside. He was just as well-kept and eloquent as I remembered, even at 10 a.m. on a Sunday. but his hair had gone white, and there were wrinkles around his blue eyes.

Inside, the house was clean, but dark and empty. I guess we've got a lot to talk about, don't we, champ? Soon after, I was wrapped in a warm blanket with a hot cup of coffee in my hand, sitting with my father at a tiny table that was dwarfed by the cabin's enormous refrigerator. We spent a while catching up, before I finally found the courage to broach the topic I'd come so far to discuss. Dad? I began.

I want to talk to you about something I saw when I was a kid. Something that I think has a lot to do with what happened between you and Mom and Eric. The blood rushed out of my father's face. You saw me eating, didn't you? He sighed. Or at least, you saw something that looked like me. My shadow. Shadow?

I frowned. I hadn't expected him to make denials or excuses, but then again, it was true that I'd never actually caught my father going from the bedroom to the kitchen. I don't know why or how, my father went on, but it happens to everyone in our family. Our worst qualities get separated from us and take on a life of their own. They become our shadows, and they come out when we sleep. Do you remember your grandma, champ? how honest and loyal and decent she was.

When I was your age, she was constantly in and out of jail on prostitution and scamming charges, not because of what she was doing, but because of what her shadow was doing while she slept. I thought of my father, always so disciplined and careful. If what he was saying were true, it made sense that his shadow would be a reckless, insatiable glutton. Sometimes the shadow separates sooner. Sometimes later. I tried to protect you kids by leaving during the worst moments. My father chuckled sadly.

But I guess you caught me anyway. A horrible realization dawned on me. What about Eric, Dad? Did Eric have a shadow? Do I? A long silence followed my question. Finally, my father spoke. You'll never understand what it was like.

seeing my own gentle Eric on all fours in the backyard, with that bloody dog collar between his teeth, his eyes black as death. My father let out a ragged breath. Your little brother's shadow separated early, son, and it was the most twisted one I've ever seen. As uncontrollable as my own shadow was becoming, I had to stick around to control Erics,

but I failed. You don't mean. A series of gruesome memories came back, me. All those missing pets. The police had said that Christy Pell had been torn apart by a coyote's claws and teeth, but something else could have caused her injuries as well. Something like child-sized human fingernails. I'd hope that after what happened to Christy, your little brother's shadow would go dormant for a long time, maybe even forever. But while you were away at college, it was too much. I staggered toward the cabin door. I wanted to sprint back to my car and

forget I'd ever heard any of this to go back to my ordinary, shadow-free life. But before I did, there was one thing I had to know. Dad, what happened to Eric? Leaves rustled and twigs snapped outside. My father looked anxiously up at the ceiling. Your little brother started spending more and more time asleep, which meant that his shadow was getting stronger. Eventually, Eric stopped waking up all together, and it was just a matter of time before his shadow killed again. Your mother and I made up that story in order to bring him out here, where his shadow could hunt wild animals. Here?

Eric is here? I gasped. Eric is unconscious upstairs. His shadow is here, and I don't think you want to see it. Something slammed into the door with a reverberating boom. My father grabbed my hand. Don't worry, it'll pass. Whatever was outside threw its full body weight into the walls again and again.

I understood why my father had built the cabin so well. Fingernails clawed at the shuttered window just a few feet away from where we sat. Outside, my brother's shadow led out a frustrated animal scream and ran off into the woods. A few minutes later, my father and I stood around Eric's bed upstairs. His hair and fingernails had been lovingly trimmed, and there was a peaceful expression on his sleeping face. I still hold out hope that one day he'll just wake up. But until then, my shadow eats what his shadow kills,

and his shadow it kills for fun. My father squeezed my shoulder. Be careful on the walk back to your car, champ. I remember moving as slowly as I dared on that muddy red path, trying not to make a sound. I remember scanning the tree line like a hunted animal, terrified that I'd see a warped, black-eyed version of my brother charging out at me. But for the life of me, I can't remember how I got back to my car at one piece.

As I pulled out onto the deserted country road, I was sure that I'd never return to my father's cabin. It was too dangerous for me, for my father, and for Eric. Or so I thought back then. But lately, I've noticed some disturbing trends around my house. Food has been disappearing from my fridge, and yesterday morning, I found my daughter's cat on the front porch with its neck broken. While I lay in bed listening to the branches outside my cozy suburban house scrape and

rustle in the night air, I can't help but wonder, as my shadow woken up at last.