The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast #13

Episode Date: November 27, 2011

Our 13th episode of The Nosleep Podcast brings you tales of unwanted visitors and breathtaking secrets. Featuring horror stories from the Reddit.com horror writing community, these stories will keep you awake as the darkness of the night surrounds you.This episode features these stories:Holes written by Joey Brashier (Redditor EightShots) and read by Wade Thorson (Redditor WadeK).We Don’t Live There Anymore written by Grant Rennet (Redditor Gristledorf) and read by Max Glaspey (Redditor MonthlyMarmot).I Saw it Coming written by Adam Kearney (Redditor ioptah) and read by Brett Seay (Redditor RockNRollahAyatollah).Button Head written by Trevor La Pay (Redditor echomanagement) and read by Max Glaspey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through the murky darkness of the night, when fear banishes sleep. It's the No Sleep podcast. Born from the nightmares of Reddit.com's No Sleep Forum, and featuring tales from Reddit's authors of horror, we present you with tales intended to frighten and disturb, and keep you awake as the night slowly creeps. past. You can hear the No Sleep podcast while on the go with Stitcher Smart Radio. Stitcher is a free podcast mobile app available for your smartphone. Downloading is quick and easy.

Just find Stitcher in your app store. Then during registration, hit the promo code box and enter No Sleep to get automatically entered to win a $100 gift card. You'll get access to lots of other amazing shows too. Always available. to you on demand. It's Stitcher Smart Radio. Don't forget to enter promo code No Sleep when you register. You'll be supporting the podcast and you'll have a chance to win. Or first tale is entitled Holes. Strange things are happening and appearing around the house. You'd better hope it's only a ghost. This story was written by Joey Brashear and is read, by Wade Thorson.

When I was about seven or eight years old, I lived with my grandparents in South Carolina. They had this big house that used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad, and I used to love discovering all the cool passageways that ran all over the place. When I wasn't doing that, my grandfather took me fishing and hunting, while my grandmother would teach me how to sew and cook. Kind of girly, but those skills definitely helped out in the long run. My folks were military, so rather than drag me around and traumatize me with multiple moves, they had me stay at my grandparents.

My room sat at essentially the middle of the house. It was surrounded on all sides by thick walls, which used to house passageways, but had since been sealed off. I hung up pictures and cool things befitting an eight-year-old's room. I loved the house, but it started to feel a little off after. a while. I noticed that my things kept disappearing. Nothing incredibly valuable, just trivial things, like my toothbrushes and combs. No, they never reappeared at some random place, and I would never see them again. My grandparents spent a fortune on my various grooming products, I imagine.

It was just my stuff, though, which left me and my family in confusion. They used to joke that a ghost must have taken a liking to me. They were kidding, of course, but I started to get really freaked out over this notion. I started paying attention to very minor noises and details, and whenever something odd did present itself, it would creep me out to the maximum. I remember drying a favorite shirt of mine, only to come back five minutes later to find the dryer door open and my shirt gone. My things would be moved, pictures of me,

that were on the walls would go missing, most importantly, these little holes started appearing in the walls around the house. They first showed up in my room, then they just popped up all over the house. The kitchen, the bathrooms, the living room, everywhere except the master bedroom where my grandparents slept. This really creeped me out. So one night I decided I was going to sleep in their room. I slept in a pretty comfy sleeping bag on the floor, and for the first time in a while, I felt pretty safe. 2 a.m. rolls around, and I wake up to this weird tapping sound. It's almost as if someone was hammering something a little ways off. It was in the middle of the country, and people are often awake doing random things at all hours, so I started to write it off. The moment I started

to shrug it off, I happened to look at the far wall directly facing me. Just in time to see a jagged piece of wall fall out, leaving another tiny hole. I yelled and woke my grandparents. They were genuinely upset for me, so we packed up a few things and left for a weekend. When we got back, the first thing I noticed is that almost everything in the house that had anything to do with me was either gone, or damaged. My room was now host to at least 30 different holes, all in varying shapes and sizes. I was exhausted and all I wanted to do was go to bed. Me and my grandparents stood in my room and demanded whatever was in the house to leave me alone. There was no great relief, there was no angry

outburst, there was no ghostly laughter, just silence. And no me feeling scared and a little silly. I decided to be brave and stay in my room that night. I awoke around 12 a.m. to a thumb, the kind I usually attribute to my family moving around, knocking into a wall. I started drifting back off, only to hear another thumb. Then another. Eventually, these grew pretty rhythmic.

I was scared out of my mind. I bolted upright and started scanning around my room. I grabbed the flashlight that I had grown to keep on my nightstand and started shining it everywhere. The floor, the walls, the holes. The thumping stopped, but I kept looking around frantically. Eventually, my beam caught something shiny and I fixated on it. As soon as I realized what it was, I screamed and started crying for my parents.

It was a human eye. My grandparents came in and saw this, an unblinking human eye staring out at the room. The police were called and came immediately. They opened the sealed portions of the house and searched every passageway they could find. Eventually, they came to the section behind my far wall, where the eye was located. I wasn't privy to the information when I was that young, but when I got older, my grandparents told me what it was. The police came upon this tiny, room, only big enough to hold one person comfortably, if only barely, there were first greeted

by what they described as a thick layer of garbage and waste. Most of this garbage was my things that had gone missing. My combs, my toothbrushes, my socks, my shoes, my washcloths, my favorite shirt. At the wall, surrounded by pictures of me was a man. He was completely naked, the only thing and keeping him upright was a belt around his neck, looped over a nearby low rafter. The cause of death was autoerotic asphyxiation. He had died, staring at me, pleasuring himself, surrounded by his sick fascination with me.

I don't think there's any getting over it. I can't stand the dark now, and now, when I go to sleep, all I can think about are holes. Our second tale is entitled, We don't live there anymore. Moving into a new home can be a wonderful experience unless the previous owners haven't decided to leave yet.

This story was written by Grant Renet and is read by Max Glassby. My wife and I both got an extremely good deal on a home last year. Our real estate agent was nice enough to be up front about the history of the home and told us that the previous family had died from a kid. gas leak or something fishy. There were detectors installed in the home now, though, so it was safe.

It's a weird feeling, sleeping in a room where you know someone else died. Anyway, things just started happening that I couldn't explain. The first night after moving in, it was raining heavily. I slept good that night. However, the next night, without that white noise, started to hear strange noises. I could swear there were footsteps downstairs in the kitchen, but I would only hear them from upstairs. Similarly, doors would slam shut upstairs while I was downstairs, but never when I was near them. I kept finding the front door ever so slightly ajar.

It was still locked, but I would wake up to find it slightly open when I was absolutely sure I had closed it all the way. A quirky house, for sure, but I had no inkling of anything. supernatural going on. Then came around the first Thursday night. I had a weird feeling in my gut all day Thursday, like the kind of uptight feeling you get before leaving on a trip. It got much worse when I got home from work. It was late in the evening,

and I was sitting at the table in the living room checking my email when I heard a small hissing noise coming from down the hall. I got up to go check out what it was, when it very clearly changed from coming down the hall the coming from upstairs. After I walked up to the top of the stairs, a wave of paranoia hit me. As I looked down the hallway to our bedroom,

the walls seemed to be moving. It was like one of those magic eye things where what you're looking at stays still, but everything in your peripheral vision starts crawling around. I stood there for a little while, just trying to get a bearing on reality, and I had a feeling like I needed to go downstairs immediately.

I don't know why. So I started going back downstairs, and after the first step, the hissing noise stopped, and that weird feeling vanished. I turned back around to look down the hallway, and everything was normal. Things got even scarier after that. When my wife and I were getting ready for bed, the power went out. I looked out the window and the neighborhood lights were still on, so I knew it had to be a fuse. I got a flashlight and went down to the basement. As I reached for the handle, my hand stopped.

I heard that slight hissing noise again coming from the other side of the door. It sounded sort of like a propane tank leaking. It was that vivid. I got down on my stomach and put my ear to the crack under the door and tried to listen to it a little closer. Suddenly, I heard a very sharp whisper say, Get out! It sounded like someone had their mouth two inches from my ear on the other side. of the door under the crack. I felt my body go rigid. This scared me so badly I had to go get

my wife to come with me to go down to the basement. I didn't tell her why, but I just needed someone else there. She joked about me being scared to go to the basement, but she had no idea. We came back to the door and I let her go down first ahead of me. I had a flashlight and she had an oil lamp. The oil lamp was a much better source of light. It let us see everything in the room at once, so I didn't have to worry about something sneaking around down there. I started to move some big boxes to get to the fuse box when the hissing noise started again. This time it was coming from the ceiling directly above us. I asked my wife if she could hear it, and to my great relief she said yes.

We both looked up at the ceiling, and the hissing noise moved from directly above us towards the door at the top of the stairs. The door slammed and at the same time, the oil lamp went out. I took my flashlight out of my pocket and turned it towards my wife. Only, it wasn't my wife. What I saw standing there was a naked, dead body. It had cuts all over its pale white skin and gaping wounds, revealing red muscle tissue. The eyes were sunken, but looking straight at me, and its brown, matted hair dripped water.

This made me drop my flashlight and scream. My wife suddenly screamed too and picked up my flashlight. She pointed it at me and asked what the hell I was doing screaming like that. The corpse was gone. I replaced the fuse and we went upstairs. I didn't sleep. She agreed the hissing noise and door slamming was really weird, but there had to be some logical explanation for it.

Maybe it was the wind that blew the door shut? I knew better. Days passed without anything else weird happening. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, everything went back to normal for a while. Then Thursday came around again. I started to get that feeling again, starting early in the evening on Thursday. I had this feeling that Thursdays played some sort of significance with what was going on. So I asked a neighbor about it earlier in the week.

Did something bad happen to the previous family on Thursday? Thursday? After a little small talk, I asked if they knew what happened to the family that used to live here. Apparently, like I was told before, they had all died at night. No one knew why. It must have been a gas leak, though, because they were all asphyxiated. That is, I'll accept the mother. They never found her. What day did this all happen on? Thursday, a fucking course. I was pretty sure the house was being home. haunted now, but at the same time I realized how stupid it was. Right? I mean, there's never been any haunting that was proven to be real. If there was, it would have been famous and on the news. It was just my imagination feeding my paranoia, but still, it was Thursday night again,

and I had this sickening feeling in my gut. Before the sun went down, I grabbed my wife and made her stay the night with me in a hotel. I didn't care about rational. staying in that house that night. On the way back to our house in the morning, a bunch of fire trucks passed us on the highway. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I should have known it. The fire trucks were heading to my house. There was thick black smoke billowing out all the windows in the front door, but it looked like there was no fire.

The furnace had backfired or something, and it started putting out a bunch of black smoke. Thank God there hadn't been a fire. All my stuff was still in there. However, the police showed up and needed to have a few words with me. Apparently, one of the firemen found the skeleton of a woman crouched in the fetal position behind the furnace in the basement. I didn't hear the hissing noise anymore after that, but we still sold the house. Our third tale is entitled, I Saw It Coming. A knock on the door every single night can leave you wondering just who or what.

is paying you a visit. This story was written by Adam Kearney and is read by Brett C. This isn't a confession. You can't prove a damn thing, so don't even try. I'll deny it to my grave. I'm on my third drink for the evening anyways.

You can't trust a word. That's when I start to feel anything these days. The third drink. Sometimes it takes four, but usually three will do. It's the same cycle every night for weeks now. I drink, then I start to feel. Then the fear comes over me. Then I drink some more until I pass out.

Wake up, slog through the day, keep my head down, keep my chin up, don't draw anyone's attention. go home repeat one night a few weeks back there was a man at my door I answered him wondering what in the devil he was doing there at that time

I live at the end of my street and there's no one around for quite a ways and even the Evangelians that come the neighborhood rarely make it all the way out to my house help me he gasped His blood-flecked lips quivering in the rain.

His forearm was badly broken. It's a bone sticking through the skin. He was pale, drenched, and the rain and blood dripping steadily from his haggard frame, pulling on my porch. There's been an accident. I need help, he wanced. Can you help me?

I nodded, Dunley, shocked at his state. Then ran inside looking for my cell phone. But by the time I got back to the door with it, he was gone. The only sign of him, a trail of splattered red, leading down my front steps and out to the front door. I stood there, shocked for him. And then I put the phone away, slammed the door, and locked him. I don't know why.

I was just scared, frightened by the whole affair. and some part of me, some damned selfish part of me, kept saying it's okay, it's someone else's problem. He's gone. Forget about it. So I poured myself a drink to ease my nerves. And then another. A few drinks later, I had forgotten all about him. And a few drinks after that,

I drunk myself to sleep. I woke up with my head throbbing. I'm not a heavy drink. Well, used to not be one anyways. I stepped outside, noticed that there was no blood on my porch, and breathed the sigh of relief. Maybe the rain washed it all the way, I thought.

Or maybe it hadn't happened at all. I went to work nursing my hangover, but I made it through the day, came home, tried to relax. I'd slept poorly the night before, and my day took what energy I had left, so I decided early in the evening to call it a night. I was just about to go to bed when there was another knock at the door, looking over to it. My heart raced.

I tried to laugh off my rising fear. It was just someone at the door, nothing to be afraid of. But as my hand reached for the knob, I heard his voice, the same quaking shudder of a voice from the night before. I need help. I stood stone still as he pounded up the door. God, it hurts, he shouted. Please, why won't you help me? I put my back squeezing my eye.

This isn't real, I thought. It can't be. And after a few seconds, the knocking stopped. And it was quiet. I flung open the door, but there was no one there. No trace of blood or sign of his presence. Unsettled, I shut the door, blocked it, and reached for a thought. And so it went.

Four more days. Each night the same. The knocking. A horrible man at my door cries for help. And each night I secured the door and waited until it stopped. Then drank myself into oblivion. By the seventh night, I'd had enough. I made a stiff drink as soon as I came home.

And then another after that. I had thought of nothing but the events of the previous week that day. So, naturally, I was anticipating the knock when it came again that moment, confirming my paranoid fears. I was waiting for it. I threw open the door upon the first knock, and there he was, battered arm hanging limp at his side, pale face twisted into a grimace. But before he could say anything, I leveled my shotgun at his face and pulled the trigger. His head popped like a blister And I fired a second time

Blowing his arm clean off and leaving a hole in his torso Covered in his wet visceral I shut the door I want to say I was in a trance That I was on autopilot out of my head But that's not true I knew exactly what I was doing I was trying to make a point

To myself See, I'm a level-headed man. I don't believe in ghosts or the supernatural or anything like that. We live in a rational world, and I damn well wasn't going to sit back and let my head play tricks on me without biting back. The say blood is hard to wash off, but it's not true. His blood washed right off of me. One shower later, I was as good as new. So when I finished cleaning up and calming down and went back to the front door,

I likewise expected there to be nothing there, as there had been no trace of him left from the previous nights. I couldn't believe it when I opened the door. His remains slumped inside like a sack full of weight. I reached down and poke the corpse. It was solid. The porch was covered in blood and war. Once more I panicked,

and this time I did go into a sort of trance. The hours passed and blur as I drugged the body around the back of the house, dug out a shallow grave, cleaned off the porch as best I could, took another shower. And then I made another drink. Tomorrow, the knocking would come again, I was sure. I hadn't just killed a man, buried him in my backyard. When I got home the next evening, I sat and waited anxious. Any moment, the knock would come, the man would again be at my door, waiting for me, asking for help. Maybe tonight I'd laugh, invite him in, ask him if he wanted to drink.

I thought, sipping my own drink nervously. The minute stretched out, and it felt like I'd waited in eternity when it finally came. The knocking, I'd read the sigh relief as I rushed to the door, but it wasn't the man. from the previous. It was the police. A car had gone off the road the night before. They wanted to know if I'd seen anyone. Maybe it was my drunken state that allowed me to lie so convincingly. But after telling them I knew nothing of it, they bid me good evening and left. My pulse hounded in my head. This couldn't be happening. It wasn't real. The thoughts piled on one by one. It all. All I could do to quell them was to keep drinking until I lost consciousness.

I called in sick the next day. Check my backyard, and sure enough, the grave I dug was still there. Still fresh. I dug him up, burned the body until it was ash. When I was done, I went back inside the house, and no one sat down. Since then, I can't feel anything. Not until I drink. Usually three, sometimes four.

And it's only then that I start to feel it. The fear. See, I'm not afraid of ghosts. I don't believe in them. I've never believed in them. Probably in part because I was raised by my heavily superstitious mother. She made her living as a psychic, telling fortunes. She claimed that she had the sight,

that she could see a person's fate before I had a person's fate fate before it had happened, and she had a steady stream of global clients that kept a roof over our heads and food on our table. So, I didn't make a big deal a lot of it. But like any kid, I rebelled against her and her beliefs. And when I went home, I found plenty of support for that rebellion. Psychics aren't real, right? No one can see the future, right?

Because now I'm afraid my mother wasn't faking it. that she really could see the fate of all those people who came to her. I'm afraid. I'm so terribly damn afraid. I can see it. Tale is entitled Buttonhead. Some government secrets are kept classified because they are far too frightening for even those who secure the information.

This story was written by Trevor LePay and is read by Max Glassby. Back in the late 80s, I worked for a U.S. Department of Energy Laboratory in the American Southwest. A set of sprawling cities within cities, the DOE Lab complex employs thousands of people, with work ranging from computer science, physics, and chemistry, all the way to important infrastructure jobs like construction or security. I worked on mainframes at the time. Like any secure government facility,

this particular complex had a set of colorful local legends that over-dramatized the mysterious work we performed. People were convinced that the labs held evidence that aliens had visited us in the 50s, or that we'd developed a neutron bomb capable of wiping out cities without destroying any buildings, or that we were sitting on cold fusion technology, but were keeping it a secret to protect the interests of big oil. These are all completely false. In reality, the labs were run much like any other company.

We had time cards, deadlines, department meetings and Boss's Day lunches, just like everybody else. Despite, or perhaps because of, the reality of mundane lab work, staff often got a kick out of perpetuating these myths. While on a lunch break, I was once asked if I'd ever been to the flying saucer hanger. Which one, I replied, we've got our own fleet. More interesting, and often much more dark, were the stories that circulated between scientists and lab staff within the walls of the complex.

One such rumor posited that physicists had briefly made contact with humans from the distant future and that the transmission was IBD. Interesting, but disturbing. Another popular rumor held that we'd created a biological agent so virulent that the labs had been forced to quarantine an entire building, raise it to the ground, and bury the rubble in the desert, along with its deceased inhabitants. My favorite story, Buttonhead is watching you.

In those days, the halls of every building were plastered with information security awareness posters, usually featuring a red-faced villain wearing a trench coat. Beware of your adversary. Protect your secrets. The enemy is always watching. Always dispose of sensitive documents in a burn bag. It's likely that Buttonhead was a mishmash of popular alien myths and the pervasive atmosphere of colds. war paranoia and embodied the idea of an insider threat.

The Buttonhead legend went something like this. When working late at night, be on the watch for Buttonhead, who prowls the laboratory halls after sundown, he can only get you when you're alone. He doesn't have a mouth to speak or ears to hear, but his eyes do more than see, and he's always watching. According to witnesses, Buttonhead looked like a person from far away, but had a featureless, roundish head with a pair of deep holes in the center of his face. Nobody ever said what Buttonhead was watching for or what he would do if he ever caught you alone. It was typically the older lab veterans who would bring up Buttonhead, along with hushed stories about the mysterious disappearance of several Night Owl employees over the years.

During a retirement party, I jokingly asked the guest of honor if he'd ever seen Buttonhead. I saw it once. In one of the old warehouses way south of the tech area, he replied, cracking a forced smile. I remember the smell most of all. So is he an alien or just a regular old ghost? The smile quickly drained away. He paused, looking like he might confess something important, but stopped short of it, muttering. No, it's much worse than that.

A few months later, I was pulling a late night in one of our mainframe rooms, performing some maintenance work with a co-worker, a contractor named Gary. Gary, a bald, pudgy, diabetic Mormon, was a salt-of-the-earth type with an easygoing demeanor. He had an abbreviated sense of humor, but didn't have a mean bone in his body, and was a good colleague. The mainframe room was in the largest single-story building in the complex, with around 20 Chris Crisorpe. crossing halls that seemed to stretch on to infinity. After working hours, most of these halls would fall pitch dark. Hall D, our mainframe hall, was still lit, but every other hall was a catacomb tunnel,

with only the faint glow of the occasional vending machine to illuminate the faraway corners of the building. The mainframe computer room itself was large, but was stuffed with IBM System 370s and noisy fridge-sized cooling units. It wasn't feng shui or anything. but we loved playing around with computers so much that we didn't mind. At around 9 or 10 that night, Gary left the room for a bio break, leaving me alone at my terminal. 30 minutes later, the lights flickered off.

This was a frequent occurrence in the aging building, which was why we armed ourselves with flashlights for the late shifts. I noticed that Gary hadn't returned from the men's room, and as I felt the call of nature myself, I grabbed my ever-ready and headed out the door to check things out. That's when I first noticed the smell. I tell folks that it smelled like mint gum and roach poison, but there was an indescribable and subtle sickness to it. I've never smelled anything like it since. It was the scent of something horribly unclean and unnatural combined with a potent artificial sweetness. I left the mainframe room and hurried toward the men's room, which was too darkened hallways over.

I made it five paces when I saw him, or... it, or whatever it was. Standing in front of the exit doors at the far end of Hall D was what looked like a man wearing a gray jumpsuit. Both it and I remained motionless as I trained my light down the hall. Seconds later, it broke into a speedwalk straight for me. It was still a few hundred feet away, but I could tell something was clearly wrong by the way it walked.

It had an impossibly fast gait, like people from old newsreel clips, and by its head, which looked like an enlarged, lumpy orb. When its face came into view, I sprinted back into the mainframe room, which thankfully had a mechanical push-button lock. The face was utterly unrecognizable. It was just a scattered set of abscesses and holes. After slamming the door shut and backing toward the desks, a figure appeared in the small frosted safety window.

It was quiet for a moment, and then it spoke. It's Gary. Let me in. I just saw something. I couldn't hear it perfectly over the drone of the fans, but something wasn't right about the voice. It sounded like Gary, but as if you were leading some sort of spoken word chant with dozens of other voices. It instantly dawned on me that Gary knew the lock combination. I was paralyzed with fear and didn't respond. At this point, the smell was so strong that it almost hurt me. to breathe. It spoke again. It's Gary. Let me in. I just saw something. It sounded like an

identical recording of what I'd heard seconds ago. My heart sunk when I realized that there weren't any other exits to the room. I backed up toward the machines, quietly hoping that the thing would go away and that the lights would come back on. A deep buzzing sound came from the other side of the door, followed by more words from the thing in the hall. Hello? Honey? The voice had the muffled pitch of a telephone receiver, but it was clearly my wife. It sounded like she was at home. Hun, is that you? Is everything okay?

I was in a state of confusion, despair, and shock. I summoned the courage to approach the door, aiming my light through the window. The police have been notified, I yelled. This was impossible, as the mainframe room wasn't technically office space. and thus had no phone. I heard something that sounded like liquid being pulled up through a novelty straw, and then a splattering sound.

A thick white fluid slowly spilled out onto the vinyl tile from underneath the door. The smell was nearly unbearable. I began yelling for help. I could hear the thing fumbling with the push-button lock. The splattering continued, and the dense white syrup kept pouring in from beneath the door. I remember retreating to the back corner of the mainframe room, and then nothing else.

Hours later, a pair of MPs found me curled up in a ball sopping wet in the rear corner of the mainframe room. My wife, who had received a call at 10.30 from someone she believed to be me, called the base police at midnight after I didn't return home. The guards didn't find any sign of forced entry, and there was no sign of Gary or the white liquid. it. The next morning, my manager told me that Gary had terminated his contract earlier that week and wasn't even scheduled to come in that day. I never saw him again. My wife and I moved to California a month later. Even though I work from home these days, my pulse still quickens when I walk down a darkened hallway. What stays with me the most is that strange, awful smell.

It's probably just my brain playing tricks, but I swear it's still. wafts in through my window some nights. This concludes this episode of the No Sleep Podcast. Thank you for listening and for letting us share the blackness of the night with you. To learn more about the podcast and the ways you can help us make more episodes, please visit nosleepaudio.reddit.com.