The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast #9

Episode Date: October 2, 2011

Our ninth episode of The Nosleep Podcast brings you tales about the lost innocence of children and the torment of psychological abuse. Featuring horror stories from the Reddit.com horror writing community, these stories will make the dark hours of the night creep slowly past.This episode features these stories:A Dream My Mother Had written by Richard Walker (Redditor wigwalk2310) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone).My Best Friend’s Grandmother written by Allison Stuart (Redditor allisonstuart) and read by Wendy Corrigan (Redditor EchoWind).Precious Machine written by Al Bruno III (Redditor magwier) and read by David Cummings & Wendy Corrigan.Balloons written by D. K. Auerbach (Redditor 1000Vultures) and read by Sammy Raynor (Redditor sammysimplicity). 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. Our first tale is entitled, A Dream My Mother Had. A recurring dream can serve as a premonition for the dreamer, and sometimes even for the generations that follow. This story was written by

Richard Walker and is read by David Cummings. I remember my mother telling me about a dream she used to have as a child. She would find herself outside an old house. desperately trying to find the way in. She would bang on the door and peer in through the windows, but inside all the rooms were dark and empty. She was never sure why she was so desperate to get inside the house, but something kept forcing her to try. In her dream, she would turn away from the house to look down the garden path,

but it was dusk, and what little light was left was blocked by the source. swaying branches overhead. Even as her eyes adjusted to the twilight, she could see nothing beyond the wind-blown limbs of a few nearby trees. Beyond that, was total darkness. When she turned around again, the front door of the house lay wide open. She stepped inside and suddenly felt the need to shut it behind her as quickly as possible, as if some unseen predator was chasing her from the darkness outside.

Inside the house was silence. Not even a ticking clock could be heard. My mother looked out through the glass in the door to see if her fear had been correct and something had been chasing her. She pressed her face tightly against the thin, cold glass, but the dusk sky had been replaced by a dark, starless night, leaving the whole house surrounded by a thick, unmoving blackness.

My mother turned and took a step inside the deathly still house. Directly in front of her was a staircase, and at the top of this, to the left, was a room with a light shining through the cracks around its closed door. My mother walked hesitantly up the stairs, never taking her eyes off this room, and never sure why she was so drawn towards it. She got to the top of the stairs and stood facing the lit room. A shadow appeared at the foot of the door, showing two feet on the other side. My startled mother took a step back and turned to run back down the stairs and, and

out into the darkness outside. The door of the lit room opened behind her and she turned to see whose feet had caused the shadow on the other side. But the light from the room was bright and before her eyes could adjust to see the shape moving towards her, the dazzling brightness from the opened door woke her out of the dream and away from the approaching horror. My mother told me that she had that dream a lot as a child, but that it gradually faded and then disappeared as she got older. She had the dream again one last time before she died. She said it was just the same as before,

only this time she wasn't as frightened at the top of the stairs, and she said if the dream came again, she wouldn't turn to run away. The next morning She was dead I am reminded of this dream As I sit and watch my daughter drift In and out of consciousness As the fever takes her

I have heard her mumble about a house And stairs And a room at the top With the light shining through I know she is weak now But she has fight left in her I am by her side whispering in her ear, telling her to turn and run when she hears the door at the top of the stairs

creak open. Our second tale is entitled, My Best Friend's Grandmother. The warmth of a grandmother's home is a welcome respite for young children and can prove to be a difficult place to leave behind. This story was written by Allison Stewart and is ready to be a difficult place. And is Read by Wendy Corrigan. When I was in elementary school, back in the mid-80s, I lived on the same street as my best friend's grandmother. After school, my best friend would walk home with me, and we would play at a grandmother's place

until it was time for me to go home and eat dinner. We lived on a little tree-lined street, a few blocks from the school. The street was quiet, and the houses were old. When we first became best friends in first grade, our playing together at her grandmothers was something that we would do once or twice a week. But by the time we were in fourth grade, she was going over to her grandmother's after school most days of the week and even started spending the night there fairly regularly.

Her grandmother was very sweet and would greet us at the door in her housecoat and ask how our day was. And we would answer as we flew out the back door into the yard to play or ran into the den to read the Alfred Hitchcock Presents Mystery Anthologies that the old woman collected. We thought it was great because we got to play together for hours every day, but what I didn't realize at the time was that the main reason that she was spending most days with her grandmother

was because her parents were going through a really difficult time. I rarely went over to her house. They lived fairly far out in the country, and she never invited me. When I did go over to her house, even at that age, it was unpleasant. I remember hearing her father screaming at her mother once, and I got scared and waited outside until my mom came to pick me up. Her parents barely spoke to me when I was there, and the look on her father's face was cold and unpleasant.

So we kept our playtime at her grandmothers. Usually when we would play, her grandmother would set out some cookies for us and some coax, or set out new books that she bought at the Goodwill that she thought we might enjoy. At some point, as it neared Thanksgiving of third grade, she stopped doing this for us. When we would walk to her grandmother's house,

my friend would make me stay outside because she said her grandmother wasn't feeling very well, and she didn't want to disturb her. During this time, she was spending every night with her grandmother, and I thought my friend didn't want to bother her and get sent home to her parents. which I understood. We would play outside,

and sometimes my friend would have to run in when her grandmother called, leaving me outside. I hated it when this happened, because even though we were on my own street, her grandmother's backyard scared me. The tall elm trees were mostly dead, and their bare branches against the gray sky

gave me the creeps. The house was also near the train tracks, and sometimes we would see people passing through the empty lot behind the house, or we would find clothes and bottles in the gaps in the hedge in the back. Sometimes the grandmother would make up plates of snacks and send them out with my friend,

and we would eat on the porch and watch cars pass. We didn't talk about her parents much, but she did say that she was happier with her grandmother, and I can't say I blamed her. Being around her parents' fighting would have been terrifying. Once, I had to pee, and my friend said she'd have to take me because her grandmother was sick

and didn't want to be bothered. We went in and she led me to the bathroom that was next to her grandmother's bedroom. I could see her in bed and I was about to say hello but my friend just put her finger to her lips and silently shushed me. The period where she was more or less living

with her grandmother went on for about three weeks until one day when my friend was absent from school. I called her grandmother's house. to see how she was feeling, but didn't get an answer, and then I called her house, but no one answered there either. It wasn't until the next day after school that my father asked me to sit down and talk with him. The grandmother passed away one night weeks earlier. My friend found her, but didn't tell her parents. Instead, she continued to stay at the grandmother's house, cooking her own meals,

and getting herself ready for school. Her parents were going to go. going through their problems, and it took them three weeks before they realized they hadn't heard from the grandmother at all. My friend was out of school for the rest of the year, and later moved away with her mother, after the parents separated. The thought that my friend lived there with her dead grandmother for weeks, and I didn't know it, depressed me. But it wasn't just that. When we would play outside, and my friend would get called in, I heard a grandmother call for her, and And when I went in the house to use the bathroom and was going to say hello to her grandmother, it was because I could see her smiling at me.

Our third tale is entitled, Precious Machine. Delving into the depths of the human psyche can be a treacherous task, especially if inspired by sinister motives. This story was written by Al Bruno III, and is read by David Cummings and Wendy Corrigan. A rusted electric fence surrounds the walled facility, and the facility itself is a series of squat single-story buildings, connected by hallways.

Every window is barred, every door is bolted, every surface is grey or blue. In this way, the Cateros Asylum keeps the murderous nightmares of its prisoners tucked away from the world of ordinary madness. Ordilies move through the hallways and buildings like ants. Jaded boredom has rendered them faceless and emotionless. They go through their routines, but have long ago stopped seeing their charges as human beings. For physicians and psychiatrists assigned to this place are no better.

Any thoughts of rehabilitating their patients have long been ground away by the never-eastern, ending crush of state-required paperwork. Only Dr. Annabel Masters truly cared about what went on here. Despite being the director of the facility, she still made it a point to oversee the progress of the women remanded to the Cateros Asylum. There is a framed photograph she kept on the wall of her office. It shows her standing within the center of a crowd of women, wearing faded hospital gowns and slippers.

She is smiling, despite the fact she is standing with a group of convicted murderers. As I went through Dr. Master's office, my gaze returned to this picture again and again. There was something about the patients that haunted me. Despite their smiling faces, their eyes seemed to be screaming. I was just a temporary administrator sent in to replace Dr. Masters while the investigation into her disappearance moved forward. forward. It was my job to restore some semblance of order to the facility, but I already knew it would be no easy task. A tall bookcase occupied one side of the room. Some of the text shelved there were the standards of our profession, but others had fallen out of print after being dismissed as bald-faced quackery.

After this, I turned my attention to her desk. It was ugly, grey, and metallic. It reminded me, of the sort of desk a school teacher might have. I searched through the drawer and found one had been locked. It took some effort, but I was able to break the lock and found seven files that were thick with handwritten notes and EEG readouts. Dr. Master's notes were written on cheap onion skin paper. Her handwriting script was cramped and strange, reading it, was hardgoing. There was one folder for each of the Cadeross's,

asylum's more infamous charges. She had been interviewing and treating these murderesses secretly. No, it was more than that. She had been experimenting on them. Even now I can recall some of her notes almost perfectly. The precious machine continues to perform better than expected on Leslie Knapp, but she resists treatment. She claws at the air and calls the names of her children.

The modified styluses titter and scratch at the paper. There is something beautiful about the patterns they make. When I play back the audio tapes, it almost sounds like an animal is skittering in the background like a rat gone wild with the urge to gnaw. A search of Dr. Master's office revealed no audio tapes or electroencephalogram, and her notes were maddeningly vague as to what exactly she was trying to accomplish. Exhaustion, confusion, and the murky February afternoon conspired to make me drowsy.

I sat down in Dr. Master's leather-backed chair and leaned back. I meant only to rest my eyes, but I was soon asleep. The dream that came was at first very literal. I was sitting in the office with the cryptic files spread out before me. There was a hollow wrapping at the door, and I called for the, the visitor to enter, not looking up from my work. Once the visitor stood on the opposite side of the desk, I became gripped with a childlike terror. I did not want to look up, but my head moved of its own volition, and I found myself staring at a figure from my long abandoned faith.

I knew that frail, beatific gaze and those stigmatic hands. But the crown of thorns he wore, was metallic and it sparked. My breath caught in my throat as the figure opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a faint scraping sound, like a record that had reached the end of its song. I awoke then, choking and gasping like a nearly drowned man, but the scratching sound continued. Once the dream had faded away and I was calm, I realized where the strange noise was coming. from. Initially, the orderlies balked at my request insisting that the moving of furniture was a job for maintenance, but I insisted. Once the heavy mahogany bookcase had been moved,

a doorway was revealed. We forced the door open and found what must have once been a storage closet. The so-called precious machine was there, and it was, as I had thought, a strangely modified EEG machine. A tangle of wires led to a web of sensors that resembled the crown I had seen in my dreams. The EEG had long run out of paper, and the styluses scraped and scratched on their bare rollers. And beneath that crown of sensors was a desiccated figure. She had only been missing for a little over a week, but the flesh had an almost mummified look to it.

We could only identify the body because of the name badge clipped to the lab coat. And by the eyes, the perfectly preserved eyes that stared back at us. Oh, how Dr. Master's eyes screamed. Dale is entitled, Balloons. School children can learn so much about life during their early years, but sometimes the lessons can come at the cost of their innocence.

This story was written by D.K. Auerbach and is read by Sammy Raynor. When I was five years old, I went to an elementary school that, from what I've come to understand, was really adamant about the importance of learning through activity. It was part of a new program designed to allow children to rise at their own pace, and to facilitate this, the school encouraged teachers to come up with really inventive lesson plans. Each teacher was given the latitude to create his or her own themes which would run for the duration of the grade and all the lessons in math, reading, etc., would be designed in the spirit of the theme. These themes were called groups. There was a space group, a sea group,

an earth group, and the group I was in, community. In kindergarten in this country, you don't learn much except how to tie your shoes and how to share, so most of it isn't very memorable. I only remember two things very clearly. I was the best at writing my name the right way and the balloon project, which was really the hallmark of the community group, since it was a pretty clever way to show how a community functioned at a really basic level. You've probably heard of this activity. On one Friday, I remember it being Friday because I was excited about the project

and it being the end of the week, toward the beginning of the year. We walked into the classroom in the morning and saw that there was a fully inflated balloon tied off with string taped to each of our desks. Sitting on each of our desk was a marker, a pen, a piece of paper, and an envelope. The project was to write a note on the paper, put it in the envelope, and attach it to the balloon, which we could draw a picture on if we wanted. Most of the kids started fighting over the balloons because they wanted different colors, but I started on my note, which I had thought a lot about.

All of the notes had to follow a loose structure, but we were allowed to be creative within those boundaries. My note was something like this. Hi, you found my balloon. My name is, blank, and I attend blank elementary school. You can keep the balloon, but I hope you write me back. I like Mighty Max, exploring, building forts, swimming, and friends. What do you like?

Write me back soon. Here's a dollar for the mail. On the dollar, I wrote four stamps right across the front, which my mom said was unnecessary, but I thought it was genius, so I did it. The teacher took a Polaroid of each of us with our balloons and had us put them in the envelope along with our letter. They also included another letter that I assume explained the nature of the project and sincere appreciation for anyone's participation in writing back and sending photos of their city or neighborhood. That was the whole idea, to build a sense of community without having to leave the school and to establish safe contact with other people. It seemed like such a fun idea.

Over the next couple of weeks, the letter started to roll in, Most came with pictures of different landmarks, and each time a letter would come in, the teacher would pin the picture on a big wall map we had put up showing where the letter had come from and how far the balloon had traveled. It was a really smart idea, because we actually looked forward to coming to school to see if we'd gotten our letter. For the duration of the year, we had one day a week where we could write back to our pen pal or another student's pen pal in case our letter hadn't come in yet.

Mine was one of the last two arrive. When I came into the classroom, I looked at my desk and once again didn't see any letter waiting for me. But as I sat down, the teacher approached me and handed me an envelope. I must have looked so excited because as I was about to open it, she put her hand on mine to stop me and said, please, don't be too upset. I didn't understand what she meant. Why would I be upset now that my letter had come?

Initially I was mystified that she would even know what was in the envelope, but now I realized that of course the teachers had screened the contents. to make sure there was nothing obscene, but all the same, how could I be disappointed? When I opened the envelope, I understood. There was no letter. The only thing in the envelope was a Polaroid, but I couldn't really make out what it was. It looked like a patch of desert, but it was too blurry to decipher. It appeared as if the camera had been moved while the picture was being taken.

There was no return address, so I couldn't even write back if I wanted to. I was crushed. The school year pressed on, and the letters had stopped coming for nearly all of the other students. After all, you can only continue a written correspondence with a kindergartner for so long. Everyone, including myself, had lost interest in the letters almost completely. Then, I got another envelope. My excitement was rejuvenated, and I reveled in the fact that I was still getting a letter when most of the other pen pals had abandoned their involvement.

It made sense that I received another delivery. There had been nothing but a blurry picture in the first. one, so this was probably to make up for that. But again, there was no letter at all, just another picture. This one was more distinguishable, but I still didn't understand it. The photo was angled way up, catching the top corner of a building, and the rest of the image was distorted by a lens flare from the sun. Because the balloons didn't travel very far, and because they were all launched on the same

day, the board became a bit cluttered, and so the policy for the students still exchanging letters became that they could take the photographs home. My best friend Josh had the second highest number of pictures taken home by the end of the year. His pen pal was really cooperative and sent him pictures from all around the neighborhood of city. Josh took home, I think, four pictures. I took home nearly 50. The envelopes were all opened by the teacher, but after a while I stopped even looking at the pictures. However, I saved them in one of my drawers that house my collections of rocks, baseball cards, comic book cards, and a little miniature baseball batting helmets that I get out of vending machines at Wind Dixie after T-ball games.

With the school year over, my attention turned to other things. My mom had gotten me a small snow cone machine for Christmas that year, and Josh had really coveted it, so much that his parents bought him a slightly nicer one for his birthday, which was toward the end of the school year. That summer, we had the idea that we would set up a snow cone stand to make money. We thought we'd make a fortune selling snow cones at $1. Josh lived in a different neighborhood, but we eventually decided that my neighborhood would be better

because there were a lot of people who cared for their lawns. The yards in my neighborhood were slightly bigger. We did this for five weekends in a row until my mom told us that we had to stop, and I've only recently come to understand why she did that. On the fifth weekend, Josh and I were counting our money. Because we both had a machine, we each had a separate stack of money

that we put together into one step. and we then split it evenly. We had made a total of $16 that day, and as Josh paid out my fifth dollar, a feeling of profound surprise consumed me. The dollar said, for stamps. Josh noticed my shock and asked if he had miscounted. I told him about the dollar, and he said,

That's so cool, man. As I thought about it, I came to agree. The idea that the dollar had made it right back to me after changing so many hands floored me. I rushed inside, to tell my mom, but my excitement coupled with her being distracted by a phone call, made my story incomprehensible, and she responded simply by saying, oh wow, that's neat. Frustrated, I ran back outside and told Josh I had something to show him.

Back in my room, I opened the drawer and took out the stack of envelopes and showed him some of the pictures. I started with the first picture, and we went through about ten before Josh lost interest, and asked if I wanted to go play in the ditch, a dirt ditch down the street from my house, before his mom came to pick him up. So that's what we did. We had a dirt war for a while, but it was interrupted several times by rustling in the woods around us. There were raccoons and stray cats that lived in there, but this was making a little too much noise, and we traded guesses at what it was in an attempt to scare each other. My last guess was that it was a mummy, but in the end, Josh kept insisting that it was a robot

because of the sounds that we heard. Before we left, he got a little serious and looked me right in the eyes and said, you heard it, didn't you? It sounded like a robot. You heard it too, right? I had heard it. And since it sounded mechanical, I agreed that it probably was a robot. It's only now that I understand what we heard. When we got back, Josh's mom was waiting for him at the kitchen table with my mom. Josh told his mom about the robot. Our moms laughed, and Josh went home. My mom and I ate dinner, and then I went to bed. I didn't stay in bed for long because I crept down. and decided that, due to the day's events, I would revisit the envelopes since now the

whole affair seemed much more interesting. I took the first envelope, and set it on the floor, and set the blurry desert Polaroid on top. I led the second envelope right next to it and placed the oddly angled Polaroid of the building's top corner on top, and did this with each picture until they formed a grid that was about 5 by 10. I was always taught to be careful with things I was collecting, even if I wasn't sure if they were valuable. I noticed that the picture of the gradually became more decipherable. There was a tree with a bird on it, a speed limit sign, power line, a group of people walking into some building. And then I saw something that becks me so powerfully that I can now, as I write this, distinctly remember feeling dizzy and capable

of only a single repeating thought. Why am I in this picture? In this photograph of the group of people entering the building, I saw myself holding hands with my mother in the very back of the crowd of people. We were at the very edge of the photo, but it was undeniably us. And as my eyes swam over the sea of polarites, I became increasingly anxious. It was a really odd feeling. It wasn't fear. It was the feeling you get when you're in trouble. I'm not sure why I was flooded with that feeling, but there I sat, floundering in the distinct sense that I had done something wrong. And this feeling only intensified as I looked on at the rest of the photos after the one that had so powerfully struck me.

I was in every photo. None of them were close shots. None of them were only of me. But I was in every single one of them, off to the side, in the back, bottom of the frame. Some of them only had the tiniest part of my face captured at the very edge of the photo, but nevertheless, I was there. I was always there. I didn't know what to do.

Her mind works in funny ways as a kid. There was a large part of me that was afraid of getting in trouble, simply for still being up. Since I already had the looming feeling of having done something wrong, I decided that I would wait until tomorrow. The next day, my mom was off work and spent most of the morning cleaning up around the house. I watched cartoons, I imagined, and waited until I thought it was a good time to show her the Polaroids. When she went out to get the mail, I grabbed a couple of the pictures and put them on the table

in front of me as I sat waiting for her to come back in. When she returned, she was already opening the mail and threw some junk mail into the trash can and I said, Mom, can you come here for a second? I have these pictures. Just give me a minute, honey. I need to mark these on the calendar. After a minute or two, she came and stood behind me and asked me what I needed. I could hear her shuffling with the mail behind me, but I just looked at the Polaroids and told her about them. As I explained more and pointed to the pictures, her frequent uh-haz and okays decreased, and she was suddenly completely quiet and only making a little noise with the mail. The next noise I heard from her sounded as if she was trying to catch her breath in a room that had no air left in it. At last her struggling gasps were conquered, and she simply dropped the remaining mail on the table and ran into the kitchen to get the phone.

Mom, I'm sorry. I didn't know about these. Don't be mad at me. With the phone pressed to her ear, she was walking and running back and forth and shouting into it. I nervously fiddle with the mail sitting next to my Polaroids. The top envelope had something sticking out of it that I thoughtlessly and anxiously pulled on until it came out. It was another Polaroid. Confused, I thought that somehow one of my Polaroids had slipped into the stack where she threw the mail down. But when I turned it over and looked at it, I realized that I had not seen this one before. To my dismay, it was me. But this one was a much closer shot.

I was surrounded by trees and was smiling. But it wasn't just me, I noticed. Josh was there, too. This was us from yesterday. I started yelling for my mom who was still screaming into the phone. I repeatedly yelled for her until she finally responded with, what? And I could only think to ask, who are you calling? I'm talking with the police, honey. But why? I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to do anything. She answered me with a response that I never

understood until I was forced to revisit these events from the earliest years of my life. She grabbed the envelope off the table and the picture of Josh and I spun and slid, landing next to the other Polaroids in front of me. She held the envelope up to my eyes, but I could only look at her and watch as all the color began draining out of her face. With tears welling up in her eyes, she said that she had to call the police because there was no postmark. 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.

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