The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast S2E01

Episode Date: May 6, 2012

The Nosleep Podcast returns from its three month hiatus with the first episode of Season Two! Our new season kicks off with tales of fractured love and tormented children. Featuring horror stories from the Reddit.com horror writing community, these stories are designed to afflict your night with no sleep. This episode features these stories:How They Met written by Hamish McGlasson (Redditor TheGreatDicktator) and read by Jessica Prokuski.Outgrowing the Nightlight written by Powell Brumm (Redditor Kyroduk) and read by Travis Newton (Redditor thetravisnewton).A Tale From My Grandpa written by Hunter H. Keegan (Redditor Igloo444) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone).Hacksaw written by Daniel Breneman (Redditor drageuth2) and read by Jessica Prokuski.The Man That Ate Newborns written by Al Bruno III (Redditor magwier) and read by David Cummings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the sunlight fades to darkness and the frightful tales creep into your mind, it's time to give in to your fear because tonight there will be no sleep. Hey everybody, this is David Cummings, the producer of the No Sleep podcast. Welcome to the first episode of our second season. Our three-month hiatus is now over, and I'm looking forward to bringing a new series of episodes to our fans, both old and new. Speaking of our fans, I want to thank all of the people who took the time over the hiatus to contact me and let me know how much you guys missed the show.

I was really surprised to see how many people started following us on Twitter or liked us on Facebook or simply sent an email asking us to start up the show again. I hope our new season will make up for our time off. By the way, if you're interested in keeping in touch with us via Twitter, or Facebook, you can find us at Facebook.com slash no sleep podcast or by following at no sleep podcast on Twitter.

Our website is nosleep audio.podbean.com and you can find us on Reddit at no sleep audio. dot Reddit.com. And you're always welcome to drop us an email at no sleep audio at gmail.com. Okay, enough of that.

My approach to the new season will be to blend in some new elements while not trying to fix things that aren't broken. I'll start each episode with this little intro section where I'll let people know about any news or updates about the podcast. Once all the jabbering is done, we will let the spooky atmosphere develop as the stories take us on our fearful journeys. So now, let's talk about this new season's first episode. We have five stories for you, and they come from Reddit's notes. Sleep Forum as well as the Library of Shadows. There are two new narrators joining the fold as Jessica Prokowski and Travis Newton join me for this episode's narrations. We're going to start with a story written by Hamish Mcglassen and narrated by Jessica Prokosky. Imagine what it would be like

to find love as the result of a horrific accident. Could the psychological scar, you know, be as painful to heal as the physical ones. Let's find out as we discover how they met. Sunny was always embarrassed when he'd tell people how they met, but it was an interesting story, so he'd loosen her up. They'd be laughing, teasing, usually pouring another drink, if not a few, and always making sure to start the story off by saying, it could have happened to anyone.

Halfway through, she would inevitably, almost routinely, start to cry. with guilt about his injuries. When this happened, Andrew and whomever their audience happened to be would harmonize in unison. A reassuring cry of, it wasn't your fault. Andy believed it, and that helped the audience as well. It wasn't as if he'd be engaged to a girl who purposely hit him with her car. He had been hitchhiking along the coastal highway, an age from any town, but close to one of the best national parks in the country. That particular day, he remembered, he'd been standing in 30-degree heat for about six hours. He'd been forced to sleep on the side of the road,

not wanting to camp in the bush for fear of missing a crucial friendly driver. He had been misinformed about hitchhiking, told by most of his friends that it was the best way to see a country. It may have been in the past, but hitchhiking in the modern age was tough. Almost every driver had been told that opening a door to a hitchhiker was opening the door to your own murderer. Couple that with the desolate landscape, and you had the three-day stretch with a hitchhiker.

without a lift that he had been enduring, not for the first time. He had been thinking for about the millionth time that he should have just driven, or bust, or anything except fucking hitchhiking. He'd been thinking about, when he got home, he was going to burn all of his carouac books. He had been thinking that when the car hit him. He'd woken up in the hospital, glad to be amongst the living, and thinking how he would sue the dirty son of a bitch who wrecked his legs. His doctor had told him that whoever had hit him, along with the motorcycle policeman who'd appeared to come by moments after the accident, had saved his life.

Working together, they had laid him in the car that had hit him and sped him to safety, the cop clearing his way with the lights and the makeshift ambulance streaming behind. Andy didn't care. They may have saved his life, but his doctor told him that he'd never walk without assistance again. That he'd be lucky if he could even function without the pain meds he was prescribed. Someone, he remembered thinking, was going to fucking pay. Then she walked through his door, five feet tall and every inch incredible. Her name was sunny, and although she couldn't stop crying for the first two weeks that she met him, it fit her perfectly. She felt so guilty that she'd cut up her license.

It had taken a year of pleading from him to convince her to get a new one. She may have hit him, but he was in love, and all thoughts of bitterness fled his mind. as he said to Sonny when he proposed, If I had to trade my legs to meet you, then it was the best damn trade I've ever made. Andy had moved into her house. It had been renovated, evolved, as she said, to meet his needs. His needs now included handrails at the toilet and a seat in the shower.

He could take a bath, at first only with Sonny's help, but later he could lower himself in from his chair with ease. He spent hours there, looking at the mural on the ceiling. In it, a mother cradled her child, who must have scraped his knee somehow. It soothed him, the sobbing child in the fetal position, comfortably cradled by its giant mother. He should have felt pain, both emotional and physical. But love is a powerful anesthetic, and in combination with the literal painkillers he was on, he had been dosed to the point where he felt nothing at all.

They had made love that night for the first time, Sonny gently easing her tiny frame onto him. Her movements slow out of intimacy and a fear of hurting him. Even the bed had a handrail, but he wasn't looking at that. So much easier to focus on her. Actually, he was finding it hard to focus on anything. The meds kept him pretty out of it, but luckily Sonny took care of remembering what medicine to take, with what and when. Lucky he had Sunny. He was embarrassed because he didn't wake up until midday the day after he had proposed. She hadn't been around. Her side of the bed was cold, and for the first time, since he had left the hospital, he didn't feel like a proper man.

He remembered that his wheelchair was on the far side of the room, and that he'd had to sit, emasculated and depressed, for the longest five minutes of his life until she came up the stairs. Andy made sure his wheelchair was always within reach after that. Sunny was out of the house a lot more than Andy. He understood she had to work, and being the sole earner at the moment put a lot of pressure on her. She'd work early mornings, late nights, overnight trips, whatever she could do to put a crust on the table.

It was a regular occurrence to wake up without her, knock himself out with a pill, and then wake up to her smiling face. If he woke up with her, he knew they would be spending the day together. When he left the house, it was with her. He needed her support to get around. Besides, nothing, apart from Sonny, really interested him anymore. Sunny was his angel. Taking on the burden of administering his meds, soothing him after his nightmares.

They came with a fever, a conscious dream, a sweaty, silent delirium. Andy never told Sonny, she felt guilty enough. But the nightmares were always of the crash, always nearly identical to actual events. Heat, hitchhiking, cursing caroac, the only awful divergence comes at the end. He remains conscious, not just. one, but after the car hits him. He feels his bones twist in their sockets, and the painkillers do not, will not work in dreams. He sees his blood spray in the air and feels a curious giddiness as he himself is knocked like fleshy bowling pin into the air. But that isn't the

worst part. The worst part is always, always the end. Twisted, broken, and bleeding on the ground, he watches a smiling, Sunny, calmly exit the bug. She ignores him, dying in front of her, and turns to examine the front of the bug. As in real life, the sturdy Volkswagen shows no sign of the impact. Turning her gaze onto him, he is always shocked by her lack of compassion. She calmly surveys the ruin the impact made of him. The nightmare always ends the same way.

Sunny reaches inside what remains of his left leg. She takes a firm grasp with her hand and drags him screaming towards the rear of the bug. She takes pleasure in the immense pain this causes at his shrieks and pleas, twisting her tiny hand inside his leg. Andy wants to wake up, has to wake up so desperately, but he can't. He never can. She lifts him as one might a child and tosses him into the deep boot of the Volkswagen. She tells him then, this creature, who looks like his sunny, but can't be, could never be. She tells him of the horrors, the blasphemies, and the tortures that she will inflict upon him.

This is always the worst part, the repulsive, horrible things coming from the face closest to his heart. But he doesn't wake up, can never wake up until she shuts the boot. The most disconcerting part of the nightmare is how close to his heart. they are to reality. He remembers how grateful he felt, how happy he still feels when he imagines the rescue. Sunny trying desperately to lift him into the car, her tiny frame dragging his huge one. The motorcycle cop, the happiest coincidence of all, who happened upon the scene and helped his dead body into her car. The two of them driving as fast as the bug could go, screaming along the desolate highway to save his life. They had saved him. She had saved him.

So he never mentioned the nightmares to Sunny, to the doctor, to anyone. He made up a different one about walking through a field made of treacle for when Sunny asked. He didn't see how that was scary, but he'd read a story with it once, and besides, it earned him a lot of sympathy blowjobs. The stairs remained the only barrier between them. They were steep, narrow, and twisted straight down from the main corridor. At the bottom of them, Sunny had told Andy, was a basement. boxes, the washing machine, and the laundry. That was all that was down there.

The garage opened into it, but there was a small four-stair climb into the basement itself, and those four stairs may as well have been Everest for Andy. There was no way Sonny could ever be able to pull him up even one stair. You only had to look at her to see her tiny frame couldn't manage to lift him. The steps had remained uninvolved. Both Sonny and Andy agreed that it was a waste of money to install a lift into what was essentially a basement. Their money, they decided, was better spent planning the wedding. Andy secretly thought it would be a great excuse to get out of doing his own washing.

So, agreeably, the stairs remained unhospitable to Andy, and the basement, a mystery. Life went on. Two years went past like two minutes. More than a little to do with the meds he still had to take. The side effects were nasty, and Andy would be knocked out or feverish for hours on end, but they killed the pain. Andy, though he lived in a sunny-centric world, was happy. He had woken without her. Smiling, he made his way to the bathroom, poured himself a bath, and popped another pill. When he woke, he thought with a smile, Sunny will have returned.

He woke as usual, with eyes blurred and mind slow. The drugs always left him dazed, and it took him a minute or two to regain his surroundings. But today, it wasn't just the drugs. The last thing he remembered was being warm and content in his bath. The cold, dusty air made him shiver and cough simultaneously. He twisted up from his sprawled position. His neck arched upwards like a flower towards the sun. Looking up, he could see the familiar mural on the ceiling of his bathroom,

but it was about two meters further than it usually was. He could see, in between the mural and himself, the rotting floorboards that must have given way beneath him. He could feel that could feel that could feel that, cold edge of a shard of bathtub pressing against his spine. His hand brushed against something that was disconcertingly soft against his palm. He was, he supposed, in the basement beneath his bathroom. From what Sonny had told him, the laundry was below the bathroom, but the room he could see was laundry only in the sense that there was a washing machine in the corner of the room. It was

most definitely, he decided, her room. He knows. Instantly, he instantly, he did, he He knows before he spots the huge bunches of torn and bloody clothes that are piled next to the washing machine. Soiled and soaked with grime even more than blood. They are the unofficial uniforms of the drifters, the homeless, and the down on their luck. He knows before he sees the pit, filled with the mixed and mangled remains of the fresh and the not so fresh, yet curiously emanating no smell. He knows. Because he knows, he scrabbles desperately trying to write himself on ruined legs.

He hasn't used his legs in three years. Without Sunny, the only way he can move is with his chair. He spots it. On its side in a pool of dirty bathwater. Two meters away. He tries to pull himself forward with his arms, cutting his hand on a broken bathtub and other horrific objects. He tries desperately to leave this room, this house, this girl

the failure to move even an inch is absolute he has nothing left he brings his stumps up into his bleeding stinging hands and pretends he is the infant in the mural he cries

because he knows that everything is not going to be all right that nothing has been right in a long time that he'll never be all right again because he knows not nightmares memories In our next tale, written by Powell Brum and narrated by Travis Newton,

we are reminded about how easy it was to alleviate childhood fears. Something as simple as a nightlight could quell the surrounding darkness. But sometimes the fear can be all too real, and that makes it very difficult when we try outgrowing the nightlight. The dark had always scared me. most children. It came when I was tired and most vulnerable and impeded my vision. It left all noise in motion to my vivid imagination which would twist a curtain into the shroud which hid death itself. To beat the dark, I always had a nightlight. It gave me a safe zone, except the day it broke.

I was seven when my nightlight burnt out. It had always been there for me, showing me that there were no monsters in my room and keeping the demons in my closet in the closet. The night it burnt out I made a vow. I vowed that I would never again depend on a nightlight to protect me with a simple chant. The dark cannot hurt me, and it never will. Once those words were uttered, I crawled under the covers and drifted to sleep. I kept my vow for years, despite bumps in the night and shadows dancing across my walls. Every night I would recite my vow, and every morning I would wake up without a scratch.

except for one fateful night on the eve of my 13th birthday. After I had performed my ritual and was closing my eyes, I felt a presence in my room. Not a strong one, just a slight movement near the window, and the slightest scratch on the wooden floors. I opened my eyes, and there it was. A ghostly figure wrapped in a billowing shroud of darkness. I quickly blinked and it was gone,

replaced by the flowing curtains. After a brief period of shock, I closed the window and went back to bed without a doubt in my mind that my chant was the truth. The next morning I woke up and immediately noticed the chill in my room. When I went to check, the window was wide open. As I went to close it, I stepped on something sharp.

A shard of jet black glass was embedded in my foot. I shed no tears as it was removed and the wound was bandaged. After I was dropped off at school, I was sent to check in with the attendance secretary, who worked on the first floor of the main building. I noticed her desk was empty, and asked where she could be found,

and was told to check the printing room in the basement. As I descended the stairs, I noticed a slight draft coming from the room at the end of the hall, where the door was slightly ajar. The fluorescent lights flickered as I entered the room at the end of the hall, and once I had reached the middle of the room, they died and the draft slammed the door behind me. As I stumbled in the dark, I heard a click as small light appeared in the corner of the room. When I approached it, I found it to be my old nightlight, still intact, except the burnt-out bulb emitted light somehow.

Upon further inspection, I noticed a sliver of the glass bulb had been broken off, allowing a small amount of light through the blackened glass. Just as I was wondering how my nightlight had got there, the light was smothered by the darkness, and the only thing I heard was a raspy voice whisper in my ear. The dark can hurt me. When older generations share their tales of wartime experiences, the horrors of war need no embellishment to frighten and disturb us,

especially when you don't know the enemy, being fought. Let's listen to one unsettling tale that I narrate as writer Hunter H. Keegan shares with us a tale from my grandpa. My grandpa was a British infantryman in the Second World War. He was only about 19 years old when he enlisted to serve his country, and while he thought that joining the military would give him opportunities to see exotic locations around the world, he was never deployed to Tunisia or Italy or the Pacific. Instead, he ended up practically in his own backyard. Switzerland. As you may know, Switzerland did its best to maintain neutral status throughout the war. But regardless of its attempts to maintain neutrality, Switzerland was still highly sought after by both

the Allied and the Axis powers. Once the Nazis began committing acts of aggression against Switzerland, England provided reinforcements to the Swiss military. Yet, in an effort to prevent open war within its borders, the Swiss government instructed its military, and subsequently the British reinforcements, to perform a series of tactical retreats into the Alps. That's how my grandpa found himself stationed in a remote village in the Swiss Alps. At that time, early in the winter of 1943, my Grandpa's company was stationed in a secluded village of about 500 people. Part of the advantage that they had with this location was that it was really hard to get to

and therefore had little chance of being spontaneously invaded by Nazi Germany. But this was also a disadvantage because it made communication with the rest of the Swiss military very difficult. The issue with communication was further compounded when sometime in early December a series of blizzard swept through the region and completely destroyed the few lines of communication that they had in the first place. So, essentially trapped in this isolated Swiss village without being able to make contact with the rest of the army, my grandpa's captain decided it would be best to uphold the standing orders and continue defending the village. Weeks passed. Any roads to the outside world

were buried in seven to nine feet of dense snowfall. And any time, telegraph or phone lines that they had were equally useless. It grew deeper into the winter. The leaves were stripped from the trees and the bare trunks protruded from the mountainside like broken ribs. The town was nestled between two large mountains. Sunlight only directly reached the town for a few hours each day, making the soldiers feel as if they were living in a state of perpetual dusk. One night, my grandpa was at the town bar with a few of his friends from the company, and a group of locals approached them.

One of them in particular was visibly upset. All of the Swiss people in the town grew up speaking German, and none of them were used to having Brits around, so one of them began shouting in broken English, Where take you, the children? Luckily, one of the guys my grandpa was drinking with spoke fluent German and was able to act as an impromptu translator. After several minutes of confusion and yelling, the translator turned to my grandpa and the rest of the soldiers and said, They say some of the village children have gone missing.

They want us to do something about it. Now, obviously, the British military doesn't exactly act as a bunch of mercenaries for hire. So my grandpa and his friends told the villagers to come back to the headquarters, really just a makeshift barracks that they had thrown together in the town's church, to talk to the captain. Due to the language barrier, the villagers' discussion with the captain took about two hours, and basically what the captain and his self-designated translator were able to piece together was this. A few weeks after the company entered the village,

the locals had noticed a variety of bizarre incidents. At first it was just benign stuff, like vanishing pieces of wood and tarp from people's sheds. But over the following two months, people realized that valuable items were being stolen from their homes. One man claimed that his family heirloom, a handmade ceremonial halberd, sort of like a traditional Swiss war axe,

had disappeared from above his. fireplace mantle. The culmination of all these incidents was when a village child went missing. Of course, many assume that the child's disappearance, although tragic and disconcerting, could be attributed to something as simple as the boy falling into a snowdrift while playing outside, or possibly being attacked and killed by a wolf or other predatory animal. But there wasn't only one child that disappeared. There were several. The villager who entered the bar who looked especially upset, that was the father of the two young boys who had gone missing two days before. He had searched everywhere for them, even rounded up a posse of his fellow

townspeople to join the effort, but they couldn't find a single clue as to what had happened to the children. The captain told the villagers that he would continue to look into the matter and that he would begin sending some of his men to patrol the streets each night, looking for whomever or whatever was the culprit behind all the strange thefts and abductions. Later that night, Private Reginald disappeared from the barracks. Disappearing children was one thing, but a grown man? It seemed unlikely than an animal, even a wolf, could have taken down a healthy, full-grown man on its own. Naturally, rumors began to surface that there was some sort of monster living in the mountains

that came down at night to feast on the occupants of the village. Despite the nightly patrols ordered by the captain, the disappearances kept occurring. Reginald was the only adult victim of whatever was preying on the village. The rest of the victims were all young kids between the ages of five and ten. All in all, including the original three kids who had gone missing, seven children vanished from the town. Many people in my grandpa's company were growing suspicious. One explanation that got passed around was that the impoverished villagers were actually selling their own children to human traffickers for extra cash. But even that didn't make sense because the roads into and out of town were still blocked by snow.

Three more weeks passed without incident. At this point it was early spring and the snow was starting to thaw. That night, coincidentally when my grandpa was on patrol with several other soldiers, they discovered what was behind the children's and Reginal's disappearances. It was sometime past midnight when my grandpa and his comrades noticed a figure peering through the bedroom window of one of the villagers. houses. My grandpa was at the opposite end of the street, so at first the figure looking through the window didn't see the patrol. My grandpa and the other soldiers yelled at the prowler, and it immediately

tore itself away from the window and began running away. Everyone in the patrol was certain that this was what was behind the disappearances and break-ins. They ran as fast as they could in pursuit, through the melting snow and ice in the dead of the night, screaming at whatever it was to stop. They kept running and running, and soon they found themselves on the outskirts of the village, where the snow was still fairly deep. The figure jumped into the ground. It looked like it had vanished into thin air at first, but as the patrol grew closer, they realized that the prowler had actually just jumped into a cave,

that had been hollowed out in the side of a snowdrift. Just as the soldiers began yelling into the cave for the figure to come out and show itself, several gunshots exploded out of the entrance to the snow cave. Without thinking, my grandpa and the rest of the patrol shouldered their weapons and all began firing into the hole. Then, silence. They waited for what seemed like hours,

but was really just a couple of minutes. One incredibly brave member of the patrol volunteered to climb into the cave and investigate. He drew his pistol, kneeled down, and crawled into the cave. Several seconds later, he emerged with a completely horrified expression on his face. My grandpa took out his flashlight and shined it into the cave when he saw the gruesome explanation behind the strange occurrences in the town. The figure that they had been chasing was Reginald, the private who had gone missing weeks before. They had shot Reginald right through the heart.

The cave was not only occupied by Reginald, but also the bodies of seven partially eaten children. Either due to the stress of being snowed in all winter, living in near constant darkness, or some sort of terrible mental issue. Reginald had gone completely insane and had begun breaking into the villagers' houses and snatching their children from their homes in the middle of the night. He had used the halberd that had been reported missing to dismember the bodies after he slit the children's throats

and hid them in the cave he carved into the snowdrift. Many people enjoy reading the details of true crime stories from the past. The salacious and often graphic details can be a source of morbid entertainment. However, as writer Daniel Brennaman shows us, sometimes these cases should remain closed. Jessica Prokosky reads for us the story of Hacksaw. A little while back, I got myself a nice, cushy paper-push. job at the local police office. Starting through all the paperwork and files and records,

making sure that things be stamped and triplicate are appropriately filed, that kind of thing. It was unexciting, dull, repetitive, and just my kind of work. I've never been an adventurous soul. Sometimes, if there wasn't much work to do, I'd take out some old case files and read them over. There were always a lot of interesting stories in there. It was like the ultimate gossip feed, only instead of half facts and speculation about who's sleeping with who, it was arson, thievery, murder. Stories of the bottom of the barrel. Stories of the people who had to bring them in. I suppose I wasn't technically supposed to read these files, but no one ever stopped me.

It was late afternoon. The heat was just killer. Really humid, too. The kind of weather you can just feel weighing down every inch of your body until you can't be asked to do much of anything. I went into the archives. We don't keep the lights on in there, and it's always somehow cooler despite the lack of air conditioning. The smell of musty paperwork was comforting, and it really seemed to jar out the air. I started digging through the old files.

Maybe I was just really bored that day, or maybe the heat had put me in a foul mood. Nothing looked really interesting. Not some old arson case from back in 68, not a grisly murder from 74, not even the case files of a mildly famous serial killer who was rumored to haunt the very building in which I worked. Of course, any place that's been around long enough is rumored to have a few ghosts, I suppose. I dug and dug and I found myself moving into the disused section of the archives, the really old files. The dry smell of paper became moldering, cloying.

The shadows seemed to grow longer, spawning, searching tendrils from every stack of paper or towering cabinet. Dust, dank, and decay began to surround me, and that's when I found one file in particular. No date. No classification. Nothing. It sat all alone in a single rusted ancient cabinet. But the file itself seemed recent, crisp, so untouched among all the ages in detritus. On its side was stamped one word in blotched red.

Hacksaw. It contained possibly the most gruesome murder cases I have ever read. First, the killer would gag their victim and tie them down. Only one case showed defensive wounds on the victim. the others almost seemed to want to be subdued, then the killer would begin to slowly cut apart the victim. They would start at the toes, first taking off small slices of skin, then removing entire digits. Despite the name on the file, the killers appeared to use a wide array of tools, knives, fires, saws, whatever was handy in the work. They would progress up the victim's body,

slicing off sections of the foot, moving up to the ankles until the entire thing was amputated. The killer would always take great care to pinch, shut arteries, and take care of the victim with basic first aid, as if they wanted the victim to live as long as possible. Then, they would do the same thing on the other side, before beginning to move up both legs. The cuts seemed to grow wider, growing more frantic. From tiny slices of a victim's toe, the killer would progress to slicing off large chunks of leg. By the time they rounded the knee, they'd only be one or two more slices from digging into their victim's guts. And still, they kept at it, only pausing to see if they could make their victims live for just a second longer.

The victim would die halfway through being disemboweled, of course. This seemed to only accelerate the killer's mania, making the victim's wounds become more and more haphazard. By the end, the victim would be cut into many, many slices. The killer would then arrange the victim, assembling the pieces. like it was a puzzle. The victim would be laid out on the floor, almost like they were walking and just fell apart. The killer would always be found with the victim, sitting in the corner of the room, staring at the victim. The killer would never say a word, almost as if they suffered some sort of psychotic break. But the next part was the most disturbing. In every case, the first person

to find the scene of the crime would inevitably become the next killer. They would be consumed by hatred of the previous killer. They would become more and more obsessed with avenging the victim. They would start talking about how the killer deserved a taste of his own medicine. And finally, they would snap. They would do everything to make the previous killer the new victim. It would all just keep on repeating in one big cycle. Even if the new killer died before they could act on their obsession, the cycle wouldn't stop. Once the new killer's body was found, the person to find it would gain the same obsession. Even if they never knew about the old killer's crime, they would grow obsessed.

The cases eventually amounted to a total of 12 murders before the sheriff at the time stepped in. He had been the first at the scene of the 12th murder, and he was starting to feel the creeping effects of the obsession overtake him. He ordered himself buried alive so that nobody would ever find his body and the killings would end. To further ensure the safety of the public, he ordered all pictures and fire. of himself destroyed. But there was one picture left. An old license photo at the bottom of the document. I saw his face. And now, in my dreams, I see another face. Old and wrinkled, rotting away in some psych ward. He hasn't spoken a word in all these years still. He's waiting for me, the smug bastard.

He's waiting for me to come and end his silence, to make him scream. He fucking deserves it. We conclude this episode with a tale of unrequited love and the dark places to which rejection can compel a person. How far would you go to win back the love of a person who has spurned you? Could you possibly sink to the depravity of threatening an innocent new life? Allow me to narrate a story which writer Al Bruno III weaves about, the man that ate newborns. Don't squirm so much, my wee one. Don't struggle.

Let me hold you close while I work up my nerve. Only a day old, and you're fighting to live. Well, so am I. Isn't that what we all want in the end? Life, a warm place to sleep, and a full belly. Well, that's what you've got, and what do I have? Nothing. I'm just a middle-aged man, used up, and waiting to die.

Just like you. Not that you realize what's coming next, of course. Then again, maybe you do understand. You may be blind and confused, but maybe you do know somehow. Is that why you keep trying to get free? This is all because of Eve. We had known each other since college. She was already halfway towards becoming a lawyer, and I was a well-respected graduate student.

You should have seen her. She was so damn beautiful, with creamy skin, just like yours. I first saw her in the college library. I was so smitten that I was so smitten that I was. I followed her home, just to see if she was married or living with a boyfriend or something like that. I spent the next few days tracking her, learning whatever I could, and once I was sure I knew enough to pass for her soulmate, I made my move. I played my cards just right and won her heart. It was a whirlwind romance, the kind of thing you'll never know.

we won. Maybe that's just as well. Maybe if you could, you'd thank me for sparing you the heartbreak. Even now, I don't know what went wrong. Was I, uh, too agreeable? Too clingy? Uh, it doesn't matter. She found someone else. The breakup was an ugly thing. Uglier than you, my wee one. She tried to be gentle. She told me we could still be friends. I was so angry. I said terrible things, but in the end, I took her up on the offer of friendship

and hoped she might come to her senses. I'll never understand women. They're called the fairer sex, but everything they do is unfair. How is it time and time again they're drawn to the wrong men? Why couldn't she see that her new boyfriend was all wrong for her? And why, for God's sake, did she marry him? Now, don't get me wrong.

I tried to move on. There were other towns, other girls, and no matter how much I learned about them before I made my move, I never got as far as I had with Eve. Was that why I kept coming back to my hometown? Was that why I stayed her friend, even though the sight of that ring on her finger left my skull pounding with rage? Calm down now, my wee one. I might drop you if you keep struggling, so.

Is that what you want? I stayed her friend. I prayed for her to divorce, but then it got worse. There were tears of joy in her eyes when she told me she was pregnant. I smiled at the news, but in the back of my mind, I was calling her a bitch. She never cried for me, but she had a fountain of tears for a baby that wasn't even born yet. A baby that at this point was just a lump of cells. no better than a tumor.

Some say life begins at conception, but I don't think it begins until you have your first real thought. Until then, you're just a thing that eats and crawls mindlessly. It was during her final trimester that I decided something radical needed to be done. I would steal her little baby, and I would keep it away until she promised. us to leave her husband and love me forever. We would raise the child together. Even though it was another man's, I would raise it as my own. Thanks to things like email and her husband's Facebook

page, I knew when Eve started to go into labor. I waited about 24 hours and then made my move. As always, I had done my homework. I knew the hospital's routine. I went at night, wearing stolen scrubs and an official-looking ID badge. I made my way to the nursery, convinced that no suspicious eyes would turn my way. I suppose love blinded me in that respect. I barely had the baby in my arms before someone raised an alarm. Escape wasn't easy, but I managed to get out of the building.

Then I found myself in the middle of a car chase. I knew I could evade the police if I made it to the state park and drove with my headlights off. The crash was a directionless blur. I thought I was running parallel to the ravine, but I ended up careening right into it. Now here I am, pinned in my car with broken bones poking through the flesh of my legs. I had dared everything and I came away empty-handed. Doubtlessly, Eve and her husband are cooing over their baby and cursing me for what I had tried to do. I'm not sure why no one has found me yet.

I mean they must be looking, but it's been two days and I'm still waiting alone. Well, I was waiting alone until you came along. The flies must have laid you when I was drifting in and out of consciousness, but now my wounded legs are crawling with maggots. This isn't cruelty. It's just that I'm so hungry, and you're all I have. I'm going to eat you first, and then, once I've gotten the taste for it, your brothers and sisters will be joining you by the handful.

I'm going to live through this, and somehow I'm going to get my Eve back. Somehow. Somehow I'll do it. Just don't squirm so much, my wee one. Don't struggle. Our time together is drawing to a close. Thanks for listening to this episode. Join us again next time when we unleash more disturbing tales

designed to afflict your night with no sleep.