Spooked - Buffer Night

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

One wrong turn leads Kyan and his friends to the most sinister encounter of their lives. This story contains explicit language, sensitive listeners please be advised. Thanks to Kyan Bond for sharing his story! If you know what’s up with Buffer Night, drop us a line, and we’ll make sure Kyan gets it. Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Dirk Schwartzhoff, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I made a little dolly. The dolly said my name. I threw it in the fire because I don't play. That gas. You've crossed over. Say. Sitting in an almost empty train station, minding my own business, and a man approaches me. Non-descript man.

The man I've never seen before. This man hands me a hundred dollar bill. What? Sir, what's this? He's like, you look like a student. who can use the money. And I'm not dressed like a vagabond or nothing. I'm freshly showered, no holes in my jeans, but here's the thing.

I am a student. And right then, I could really, really, really use this money. Sure, thank you very much. But he's already walking away. The train stops, not my train, and a woman emerges. Walking a pot-belly pig on a jewel leash looks at me like, This is the thing that everybody does, you know, walking pigs and train stations. My train arrives next.

I get on. The other end of the train car, there's a guy about my age standing. He's holding on to two of the hanging circle things that you grab onto. I stand holding a hanging circle as well. He looks out of the window, looks at me, gives a wink, Then does a backflip before resuming his gaze out of the window. And it's like, one of these things happening, fine, that's life. Two, okay.

But three, in quick succession back to back, it's not crazy. I don't see anyone levitating, breathe in fire, but it feels off. Weird, like I'm being punked. Like, I've wandered into someone else's play. Different several times. When I've been in places and situations where for one reason or another, things just didn't smell right. Now, it's a summer of 1996 and 15-year-old Kayin

lives in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. He's too young to have a driver's license, but he's got something just as good. Friends named Paul and Taylor. Paul and Taylor can drive. Even better? They've got Taylor's mom's car for the weekend. It's summer.

Nobody cares where we go. There's no real expectations of you need to be home by this time because you've got school or anything like that or homework. And we decided, let's do something bigger than just go to the mall. There was a water park in Southern Missouri. We left really early because it wasn't like just get on the highway and then get off at that exit. It was kind of off the main path a little bit. We hop in Paul's old Lincoln Town car and we are headed out.

The drive took around three hours. It was a fantastic day. It was sunny. It was beautiful. For Paul, it was definitely about the water slides. for Taylor and I, we were both very much. Like, there are girls everywhere. We're shooting our shots.

Like, hey, what's up? Do you go to school? What are you doing this summer? I was a little on the chubbier side, and so I was less confident. So I was definitely not trying to show off, but Taylor was doing a full flip into the pool and things like that. Paul, he's like, come on, let's go, let's go.

The slide is amazing. We gave up our pursuit of girls for a minute to go do that. And it was. It was a really fun slide. We're there all day. The sun was starting to go down. We were still juiced. I had three or four sodas and like a slushy.

I was like on a sugar rush. I was ready to keep going. But the park's closing. On the way back, Taylor was driving. Paul's talking about the slides. We're talking about the girls. You know, how'd you see that one, you know, Pink, oh my God.

We're recounting our pervy teenage memories. So we're not focused on where our idiot driver is taking us. It's starting to get real dark. There's no trace of the sun anymore. Taylor's like, I'm pretty sure this is the turn. And we turn off, and there are some lights. But there's no more stores. There's no houses.

This is like some county line road or something. He makes a turn and then another turn. And now we're on dirt roads. The road is getting really, really bumpy. The car was a shitbox. And in this bumpy, bouncy, bouncy car, it's like we're riding bowls or something. And he's going way too fast. Finally, we're like, Taylor, where are we?

What's the gas at, Taylor? We look over, and it is just right on the E. We don't have enough to get back to even anywhere the last time we saw anything. So in our teenage brains, the only way is forward. We have to keep going because if we go back, we're going to just run out of gas. at least this way we might have a shot. The first thing that we see that gives us a little bit of hope is a crossroad. And going across the road are power lines.

Power lines got to feed something. Taylor's like right or left. And Paul and I were both adamant, turn left. We thought left was the direction of home. Then, in the distance, one little dinky street. light, across the street from the light, is a gas station. A very old gas station. But they had pumps, they had lights on inside, and they had a crappy neon light that said open. We're like, yes, yes, that's what I'm talking about. We're all so excited. We're going to get gas, we're going to

grab some snacks, we're going to figure out where we're are and we're going to go home. So we pull up and it's one of those old kind of gas pumps where you pump and then you go inside and pay. Like, all right, Paul was going to pump the gas. Taylor and I were going to go inside and get directions and pay for the gas. So we walk over to the door to this place. I want to say there was some little wooden sign above the door giving it a name, but heck if I remember it. I see one or two overhead neon lights, kind of a dingy tile, a few shelves that had like loaves of bread and motor oil and windshield wipers, gum. I know they had a boar's head, like a stuffed boar's head mounted on the wall.

As we came in, there was a guy standing next to the counter, old guy, gray hair, wearing, old dingy, oversized jeans, a ratty old button-up. He definitely didn't have all his teeth, probably in his 60s or so, and was just like, well, hello, very animated guy and very comforting. Taylor spoke first, and he said, we are lost. we have a map. Could you show us where we're at and give us direction? It takes him a minute to figure out exactly where we are on this map.

He's like, we're right here, and you're going to take this road, you're going to go straight here, and then you're going to see a sign for this road, and right here is where you're going to turn. Both Taylor and this old man are heads down looking at this map. I'm listening to him. because I don't trust Taylor to nail this down. As soon as he's finished given the directions, his body doesn't move, just his head looks up.

His eyes are darting back and forth to both of us. And he's like, now you all better make haste, because tonight is buffer night. There's a stiffness to it, like warning somebody. Taylor and I just kind of looked at each other like, okay, we didn't, I wasn't exactly sure that's what I heard him say. My first thought was that I'd misheard him or that he had such a southern patois that he was saying buffet. That they were going to buffet tonight.

We need to get out of there because they were going to go eat at a buffet. I was like, he's going out to eat. And then a voice called out from another room, like a storeroom area or something. I could not hear what they said. But then he called out, yeah. And these two people come out. A man and a woman, they're like in their early 20s, maybe late teens, and they're standing right side by side, like shoulders touching. The girl's wearing a tank top and some old jeans.

The guy's wearing some old jeans and he has this button up style shirt very out of date. And they look like they could be related. They both have the same kind of dirty blonde hair. Their eyes are on me. They looked excited. Their grins were too big. Really, really happy. Almost giddy.

And then they look at the old man. And they say, are these our guests tonight? I'm like, God, like what? Like, what's going on? And the old man shot him this look. And it was like, no, these are some lost children. Every alarm in my head is just going off. I've taken one step closer towards the door.

The two people, they kind of looked at each other, and then the female, she was like, well, the three of you had better make haste because tonight's Buffer Night. She used the same words verbatim. She wasn't smiling anymore. Every single primal instinct in my body is saying, run. I'm shaking. What the fuck is Buffer Night? at this point Taylor's freaked out too.

I'm like, let's get out of here. Let's go. Let's go, bud. Gas wasn't even a buck a gallon. We threw down at 20. We didn't wait for change. And I was like, thank you so much. And I'm pulling Taylor. Bolt it out of there.

We are scrambling. We're jumping in the car. It's Scooby-Doo. Paul is finished pumping the gas and he's sitting in the backseat. He's like, what's going on? and we're just like, go, go, go. I barely got the door closed before we are airborne. Before we could even tell Paul what was going on,

Paul was like, man, that was weird. And we were like, what do you mean? What happened? He was like, the whole time I was pumping gas, there were these three guys standing over there under the tree across the little road on the other side of the fence, just staring at me. I waved at him.

I was like, hey, fellas, nothing. They didn't budge an inch. We're telling him, like, do you know what buffer night means? He's like, buffer night. What's buffer night? I'm like, we don't know, but we have to get the hell out of there because tonight's fucking buffer night, I guess. And then Taylor says, what if these are bad directions? What if this is where they want us to go?

And we're like, well, the other way is nothing. Once we've made the second turn, we're on an actual highway with, double yellow lines and we see a sign and we're like, yep, this is right. And we're just, it's just this like, we're talking about what all this could be and we are going dark. Our minds are in terrible places. I'm landing on a situation where we're on the menu, either some type of cannibal thing or we're going to be tied up in some back room with people taking turns doing whatever they feel like to us, and then that will be the story. Kine and the guys went to the water park, and we're never seen or heard from again.

We get back to the house, and we are going to the bathroom for the first time because we've been too scared to stop. Taylor put on some TV to kind of give us something else to look at and think about, but I don't think any of us were really watching it. Taylor and I kept trying to figure it out. Paul didn't want to talk about it. Like, let's just not ever think about it again. A few days later, I always had to mow my great-grandmother's yard, and I called her M-M-M-M-M-A. And I had just come inside for something to drink, and it hit me. Ask Mom-M-M-A.

And I said, Mom, I was up in Missouri last week, and I ran into somebody, and they said that tonight was Buffer night. She just kind of stood, like, stared blankly. I'm like, do you have any idea what that is? And she says, buffer night, no idea. I asked some of her friends, I asked my grandfather, people that had lived in Northwest Arkansas in the surrounding areas their whole lives, they ever heard of that. And nobody had ever heard of anything like that. I'm telling the story in college to a group of friends, and a couple of them got really into it.

They were like, that can't be that far from here. A few times on the weekends, we go out for drives. Like, let's head out to where we think this might be. Let's try to retrace the steps. Nothing looks familiar. There'd been so much development through there that we just couldn't find anything. When you're watching a scary movie, you see a character do something, and you're like, no one in their right mind would do something like that.

Paul Taylor and I, we survived that scary movie. We were the guys that showed up at the beginning before the kids that get slaughtered. We saw the signs. We read the room. We were the guys that got away. We took off. We escaped Buffer Night. If you know anything about Buffer Night, please let me know.

Thanks so much to Cahian Bond for sharing his story. If you know what's up with Buffer Knight, drop us a line. We'll make sure that Kahn gets it. That's a story. The original score was by Dirk Swartzoff. It was produced by Ann Ford. See, they've got the GPS. They've got the satellite systems, the chat GPT-15,

with all the answers they want you to think there's no more wonder in the world. But if the only mystery left is the next app on your phone. Don't let them trick you. wonder abound, spooked each and every week, let someone know. And right now, you know what I'm looking for. I'm looking for someone who shares a magical bond with someone who they spent time in the womb with, who finish each other's thought, feel each other's pains,

shares special gifts no one understands, twins, the Gemini. If you're one of those people, or you know someone with this bond, this magical bond, we'd love to hear about it really would spooked at snapjudgment.org there is nothing better than the spook story

from a spooked listener as brought you by the team that would turn the car around immediately the slightest mention of anything called Buffer Night except for Mark Wistich he's the guy at the movie who wants to discover where this red fluid behind the scary door

is coming from there's Davy Kim Zoe Frigno, Ann Ford Eric Aniaz Teo DeKot, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creeky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, and Dity Amato, and Lulu, Tumima. The spook theme song is by Pat Massidi Miller. My name is in Washington. Do you ever met someone who was lucky? Really lucky where things pretty much always went their way. Dancing through life, rolling double-sixes every time to the point where they depend upon it. lean upon it, make plans around it.

And that is fantastic. It's good for them. But there's one thing I know. It's that while the universe is certainly not there, she does have a sense of humor. When you least expect it, even the most long-lasting strings come to an end. And when they come to an end,

when they end, my lucky friends, you get mad at the change in fortune, and shout about how it's not right, or do you seek counsel from someone not born under a rainbow? What I like to do? It's just let the universe know. I mean, I'm a joke. How do you do that? There's a little signal we've devised a little way to say, I see you, and I don't appreciate being toyed with.

No. Do whatever you must, but you can't stick up on me because I will never, never. Ever, ever, ever, never.