The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S3E21

Episode Date: March 16, 2014

It's episode 21 of Season 3. We have six tales for you in this episode featuring stories about glimpses into the future and the past; from deep within and the depths of space. The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales.  "It Wasn't My Stop" written by Juan Flores and read by Jessica McEvoy. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:03:30) "What It Said" written by Jon Patrick and read by Kyle Akers. (Story starts at 00:09:05) "The Cecil Hotel" written by Mateo Hellion and read by Lynne Darlington. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:21:15) "Just Another Lee-Enfield Rifle" written by Alex Hetherington and read by David Cummings. (Story starts at 00:33:00) "Viola's Baby" written by Catriona Richards and read by David Cummings & Wendy Corrigan. (Story starts at 01:02:55) "The Warren" written by Liz Stokes and read by Kellie Fitzgerald, Jessica McEvoy, Ricardo Chica, and David Cummings. (Story starts at 01:22:35) Click here to learn more about Fear's Accomplice Click here to learn more about Lynne Darlington Click here to learn more about Kellie Fitzgerald Click here to learn more about Mateo Hellion Podcast produced by: David Cummings Music & Sound Design by: David Cummings, unless otherwise noted The NoSleep Podcast uses the PSE Hybrid Library exclusively for its sound design. This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons License 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the sunlight fades to darkness, the frightful tales creep into your mind. There will be, and now he was listening. There's little boys. Brace yourself for the No Sleep podcast. It's episode 21 of season three. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Cummings. We have six tales for a little bit of,

you in this episode featuring stories about glimpses into the future and the past from deep within and the depths of space fans of this show are often on the lookout for more places to find good quality horror stories friend of the show john perkins is an author whose work appears in a new horror anthology entitled fears accomplice john asked john asked if I could plug the book on the show forum, and I'm happy to let our listeners know about it. Here's a short promo for the book.

Prepare to hold the hand of fears accomplice and be guided through a world of terror. Along the way, you will encounter all manner of frights, from unmentionable supernatural beings to pure human evil, and all the absurdity that falls into the dark spaces between. Will you crumble after the

first tale, or can you stomach it to the death? Fears Accomplice, Volume 1, an anthology of 19 horror short stories edited by T.M. McLean, available on Amazon, smash words, and create space now. Buy your copy today. Check the show notes for a link to find out more about the book and how you can support the author's work. We also have some new narrators joining us for this episode.

Jessica McAvoy, Lynn Darlington, and Ricardo Chicaa will all be sharing their voice talent with us. so we welcome them to the podcast. That's all the business out of the way. Now, let's start the show. Our first tale takes place on a city bus, usually one of the more mundane parts of the day. In this tale from author Juan Flores,

we discover that this bus ride is anything but boring. Narrator Jessica McAvoy reads the tale for us about how one passenger's seemingly helpful gesture hides a more bizarre ability. She discovered this when she realized it wasn't my stop. I was running errands today, sending packages, paying bills, making phone calls, etc. I'd actually gotten everything I needed to do done really early in the day, almost four hours ahead of schedule, so I was excited to have a little time to relax when I got home. So I got on a bus, one that takes me almost directly to my house.

The stop is literally with an eyesight of my front door. The bus ride takes about 30 minutes to get from where I was to my street, but would probably take a little longer today since the bus was unusually packed with people. Now, I don't know how long it had been going on before I noticed, but about 10 minutes into my ride, I saw something peculiar. There was only one person pulling the string that signaled the driver that a stop was requested. There was nothing unusual looking about this man. He was an average-looking white guy with a clean suit and tie-on and holding a briefcase in his lap.

He was sitting near the front of the bus. He slowly looked around at all the people on the bus, but not in a creepy way at all, just with a sense of curiosity, it seemed. The man pulled the string. The bus came to the next stop, and two people who seemed to be a couple got off the bus. As soon as the bus started moving again, the man reached up and pulled the string. The bus stopped once more, and about 45 people got off at the stop. No one else seemed to notice this strange event that was happening. Everyone else was either staring deeply into their electronic devices

or staring out the windows as the streets passed by. I was the only one aware of what the man was doing, or maybe even aware of the man himself. After a few stops in a row, I thought to myself, oh, he's just pulling the string at every stop. And since there are so many people on board, someone has needed to stop every time. This theory seemed to hold for about five minutes as we made our way through a residential area of town.

Then he stopped. Neither the man nor anyone else pulled the string for about five to seven stops until finally. The man pulled the string once more. The bus stopped and another two passengers departed the bus. My mind raced to find a solution to this strange occurrence. And finally, I came to the conclusion that the man was irregular on this bus route at this time of the day. and had come to know exactly where all his fellow bus frequenters' stops were. Just to be sure, I decided to play along, so to speak, and see if he did it for my stop.

By the time we got close to my stop, there was only the man, myself, and an old lady still riding the bus. The bell signaling a stop had not been rung for maybe ten stops. We passed the stop right before mine, and I waited for the man to pull the string. I stared directly at the string above the man's head, waiting to see his arm reach up. up and pulled a signal my stop. Because I was focused so strongly on the string, I only realized he wasn't going to pull it as we passed the street sign for my stop. For some reason, I let out a sigh of relief, and then reached for the string so that I could get off at the stop after mine. I looked over at the man and saw that he had pulled the string before my hand was even close. I was puzzled.

The bus came to a stop, and as I made my way to the door, I watched for either the man or the old lady to get up, but neither did. I passed by the man and turned back to stay in a playful manner. You were close, but my stop was back there. I waited for the man to respond, and finally he looked up at me. He didn't say anything for it seemed like ten seconds, and then he finally spoke. In a calm, collected voice, he slowly said, No, it wasn't.

I expected some follow-up statement from him, but it never came. So I quickly exited the bus, thinking the bus driver was I took the final step. I made my way back towards my street, and as I turned the corner, I saw that there was a car accident right on top of the crosswalk at my street. The crosswalk I would have taken had I made my stop. The crash extended into the middle of the street, so I knew the bus didn't pass by it before. The crash had happened sometime in the three to four minutes between the bus passing my street and me coming back.

There are few accomplishments by the human race that can match our foray into discovering outer space. When the Voyager program was launched in 1977, it expanded our knowledge of our own solar system and now beyond. As author John Patrick writes, tracking data from the probes leads a small team of scientists into a strange and unsettling discovery. narrator Kyle Akers reads the story for us as we find out what it said. It's the farthest man-made object from Earth. It's traveling about 17 kilometers a second away from our sun. It's currently 19,000, 30,000, 345,170 kilometers away. That's more than 127 astronomical units,

which is the distance from the earth to the sun. Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977, and around August 2012, it was said to have broken into interstellar space. That means it's now outside the influence of our sun. Voyager, both one and two, came equipped with a golden record. This is an attempt to explain life on earth extraterrestrials. Seeing as how Voyager 1, thanks to a massive gravity assist, is now the farthest, fastest moving object from our planet.

This seems reasonable. I've been a huge fan of the Voyager program since I first heard about it. And recently, in late 2012, a few old buddies of mine from college grouped up and tried to track Voyager 1. We have all since graduated with degrees in physics, engineering, mathematics, and theoretical physics.

One of us went a little overboard on our degree and got the PhD. I'm the engineer, just to clarify, The Voyager 1 probe was tracked by amateur radio operators in Germany using a 20-meter dish. We decided we were going to do something similar. We knew we'd need to find a radio telescope capable of such an undertaking. It's moved over 4 billion kilometers since 2006. And in doing so, we'd need to be sponsored and have some sort of goal that would make a marketable splash.

Well, we came up with a pretty hefty goal. We were going to receive data, a transmission, from the data tape recorder on Voyager 1. This instrument is scheduled to power down for the last time, sometime in 2015, maybe slightly before or after. This being a hefty goal, we knew our work was cut out for us. After a few months of searching for a sponsor, we finally located an entrepreneur based on the east coast of the US who was willing to take us on. I'll leave his name out for this, safe to say he has a few billion dollars to his name and

eye for science. We'd be using an array of 25 meter antennas in the southwest United States to track Voyager 1. Again, I'll be leaving the name out. Several months later, after much preparation, various calculations, projections, and mathematical assumptions, we were ready to hit the array and begin our search. We could probably have collaborated with NASA and been given some of their data, but we wanted to rerun the exact course of Voyager 1 as it passed by all of its goals. factoring in the massive gravity assist from Jupiter, we wanted to see just how close our math was to actuality. It was part of our experiment. Close doesn't cut it in space.

Thankfully, we were almost dead on. Even then, it still took several days to actually confirm that we had, in fact, located Voyager 1. Once this confirmation was received, at something around 2.30 a.m. Pizza slices were thrown in the air, mountain dew, and a few glasses of champagne. were chugged, and cheers sounded between the four of us and a few other radio operators who happened to be nearby and knew what we were doing. Here's where things became odd. On tracking, we recorded two distinct thuds, roughly one hour after we verified our target.

There shouldn't be anything out there. Particles would gravitate away from the general vicinity of the Voyager probe, unless an outside force had acted upon them. It didn't seem like much, but from our calculations, assuming, the 1,590-pound mass of Voyager 1 on Earth, the thuds were the equivalent of 150-pound force hitting the probe each time. We were sleepy, groggy to say the least. None of us had ever done anything like this before, and most of us wanted it just crash. So we left the recorder on and called it a night. At 5 a.m. a radio tech came screaming into our room saying

something was wrong. You killed Voyager, with the exact words. All of us bolted to our previous stations and, well, we sat there. It takes a long time to communicate with something that far from Earth. Mechanically speaking, hardly anything had changed with the probe. The gyroscope was off, but stable. Not uncommon by a few fractions of a degree. And all of the hardware seemed to be in working order. The now very pale radio tech proceeded to supply us with the recorded telemetry from the events that sent him running.

It began at 4.37 a.m. when a much larger thud than before was recorded. This one being the equivalent of a 500-pound force, slowly nudging into Voyager and becoming stuck there, essentially. It wouldn't damage the probe unless it was moving faster. Voyager then goes dark, I mean completely. It's like it no longer exists until 458 a.m., a few minutes before we were woken from our brief slumber. Nothing had happened since then, according to the other graveyard shift operators in the room. We all had headphones on listening to the tracking, and it was also being recorded. Suddenly the static cleared up completely.

We all shared a look, assuming the worst. Clear static tends to mean we've been disconnected or we've lost track of the probe. After a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity, we hear another dull thud. and a scraping sound. Some of these sounds are inferred due to the age of the data tape recorder, but what we all heard then may as well have been recorded next door. Doose bumps prickled my skin as the headphones began to play the most eerie sound I could imagine at the time.

The recorder was running, and I knew I'd need to analyze whatever was making this distorted sound more than once to make sure I hadn't lost my mind. The sound was like a needle landing on an old school record player, except that no means. music or audible noise followed. There were more scrapes and then suddenly, silence. The static began to come back and we heard another series of thuds. Now, at this point, as you can imagine, we all have come to the same conclusion. There is something on Voyager 1. Something other than us had interacted with the probe. We all sat there dumbfounded, staring at each other, wondering how this was going to hit the scientific community, how we'd prove it,

How many people would tell us we were crazy? What the hell we were going to do next? Our sponsor arrived in the complex at that moment and informed us that we were to tell no one. Our contracts had a clause in the fine print on one of the numerous pages that we'd all assumed were legal bull crap. He owned the rights to any sort of data pertaining to a non-human interaction with the probe. I assumed that he had meant an impact of sorts. The probe was moving at 17 kilometers a second, and there are other objects in school. space, I didn't have a thought otherwise. Each of us sat there and let what we just been told

sink in. Suddenly the static cleared one final time and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. The telemetry I was receiving indicated that Voyager had gained roughly 80 kilograms and that it was moving about the surface of the probe in such a manner as to cause the internal gyroscope to make corrections to keep the probe upright. There is no up in space, but the probe has a manner in which it moves through space and that was being disturbed. Through the now crystal clear transmission, I heard a few more knocks and then silence. The crackle came back and we were forcibly removed from our posts by a few men with guns, claiming to be company security.

After we left, we were given the possessions that we'd kept in our bunks since the start of our research, sands anything technological, of course, and warned again of the legal and illegal repercussions we would endure should any of us try to expose what had happened. We briefly tried to reunite, but every time we'd talk to each other via phone or internet, we'd find ourselves followed and monitored. I once found a bug in my car and told my friends that enough was enough.

We'd have to just let this sit for a while and let things work themselves out, even if none of us liked it. Reluctantly, we all parted ways and slowly I began to go on with my life, all the while knowing that there was something more out there, something undiscovered, and something that had the capability to interact with a probe launched from Earth more than 40 years ago. This thought haunted me until I received a

fax, yes, a fax in 2014, from my theoretical physicist friend using a code we learned in early college as a joke. The code was difficult to decipher when spoken and quite cumbersome when written. I recognized it immediately for what it was. I was elated. to learn that he'd been in contact with our other friends, and that he'd arranged for us to meet secretly on our old college campus. Once there, he revealed to us that he'd been secretly storing data on a USB drive, attached with a long cable laid across the floor of the control room for the array that had been connected to a small label printer.

He was always the conspiracy nut, and this time, it paid off. He told us the thuds we were hearing could actually be interpreted as an antiquated version of Morse code. The thuds and scrapes could be converted into dots and dashes using length, force, and location. We used an old laptop that my friend had acquired off the books to analyze the data on the flash drive and to determine what message we were receiving from Voyager before we had left, if there was any. The result terrifies me. That a creature of some sorts could gather intelligence from radio signals we've been broadcasting into space for years

and using Voyager 1's golden record is the key that it could leave a message for us. I learned to write things in a pseudo-code to avoid being censored by those watching me. It's not that hard anymore. They've been more lax lately in monitoring my communications, and as long as I leave key words and phrases out, more separated, I can do nearly anything online.

The above is a warning. As we put the data together, the message was revealed. It said, hello. There is a very real hotel in Los Angeles that has a rather infamous past. Its previous residence includes serial killers, and as author Matteo Helion describes, it has also been the scene of some bizarre murders and suicides. When a woman checks in to discover the hotel's dark history,

She finds out why the hotel has earned its reputation. Nader Lynn Darlington reads the tale for us about the place called the Cecil Hotel. It's not what it seems at the Cecil Hotel, not by a long shot. Beyond the vintage European-styled rooms and lobby that pays tribute to the nostalgic era of the 1920s, something evil, Lurks. Murders and suicides plagued the hotel early on, and at least two serial killers are known to have stayed within the hotel as they actively killed the citizens of L.A.

Jacqueline knew this, of course. It was her passion. She loved history and she loved dark history even more. So a weekend trip to the Cecil Hotel sounded like the perfect, creepy getaway. She arrived early on a drizzly set. Saturday morning with her single travel bag with an extra pair of clothing, her toothbrush, notebook, and camera. Jacqueline checked into the hotel and requested room 1414, the same room that the night stalker had supposedly stayed in. She tossed her backpack on the bed and started

snapping pictures of the room. It was going to be a great entry to her blog. Around noon, Jacqueline made her way to the lobby and out for a quick lunch. On her way, she stopped at a nearby bookstore and bought a book on the Cecil Hotel. Then, book in one hand and sandwich in the other, Jacqueline returned to the hotel. Even with all of the ghost hunts Jacqueline had been on, all of the graveyard she'd walked through, and even a Ouija board session or two, Jacqueline wasn't prepared for what she found inside her hotel room. She walked into the room with her nose buried in the book she just purchased and missed it completely at first. But as she set her lunch on the small counter, something on the bed caught her eye.

Jacqueline slowly looked over at the bed and gasped. The extra set of clothing she had brought had been taken out and laid carefully on top of the bed so that it resembled a person. Her long-sleeved shirt lay flat with its arms up and bent back. back as if their invisible hands would be tucked comfortably behind an invisible head. The shirt was tucked into a pair of blue jeans with the legs crossed at the ankles. Even her extra socks had been placed where feet would have been. Heart, racing, Jacqueline grabbed her camera and voice recorder and began snapping pictures and recording audio.

After the tenth photo, Jacqueline worked up the nerve to check something that was bothering her. She placed the camera down and reached over to the clothing. Slowly she pulled on the beltline of the jeans. Don't be there, don't be there, she whispered. Tucked inside the jeans was her extra pair of panties. She shuddered. Prank or no prank, someone or something had touched her panties and that more than a little freaked her out.

Jacqueline walked over to the bathroom and turned on the sink. She let the cool water flow over her hands and then splashed her face. When she returned from the bedroom, she screamed. The clothing had been moved. Only now the legs of the jeans were spread with the knee slightly bent and the fly unbuttoned and wide open. The right sleeve of the shirt was down and the invisible hand would have been at the crotch of the jeans.

The left sleeve of the shirt was also bent down, but only to the breast area of the shirt. It was so sexual in nature that Jacqueline actually felt violated, even though she wasn't currently wearing the clothing. Jacqueline grabbed her computer, camera, and audio recorder and quickly left the room. She was too scared to stay there any longer, and she needed a couple of hours to process what she had just experienced. She walked down to the nearby coffee shop and ordered herself a coffee. Then, as she sipped the black steaming liquid,

she ran the audio recording through the sound editing program she had on her computer. Jacqueline put on a pair of headphones and hit play. At first, all she could hear was the light static of white noise. But then her ears detected something faint and hidden in the background. She played with the program and fine-tune the audio. file, then hit play again. She heard herself almost beg. Immediately following her voice, she heard the faint, raspy male voice.

Jacqueline ripped off the headphones and pushed herself away from the table, spooked. A few of the coffee shop's patrons glanced her way, but most ignored her. She collected herself and sat back down to listen to the rest of the audio file. An hour later and two pages worth of a story for her blog, Jacqueline left the coffee shop to retrieve her belongings from her room. As she entered the elevator and hit the button for the 14th floor, she noticed that the elevator seemed colder than before. Much colder.

The door slid shut and the elevator lurched as it climbed up the elevator shaft of the old building. The small space continued to increase in coldness. It didn't take long and Jacqueline could actually see her breath. breath. She gripped her computer bag and pushed the closest floor so that she could get out of the elevator. As she stepped back and looked at the polished aluminum door, she dropped her belongings and let out a scream. Standing behind her was the black silhouette of a huge man. It reflected off of the metal towering over her, but not enough to make out facial features. She half turned, half jumped around in panic only to find herself alone once.

again. The door slid open and Jacqueline stepped out. A voice called out to her from down the hall. The voice was sinister and husky. She jumped back into the elevator and began pushing buttons, anything to get the elevator moving again. The voice called out again. Jacqueline stepped back into the hall and nervously looked about. Still, no one was in the hall to be speaking with her, but she could feel someone or something there. It was watching her, getting closer with each passing second. The voice repeated over and over. She bolted back into the elevator and jabbed at all of the buttons

in a futile attempt to get the damn elevator moving again, even though she knew she was likely overloading the machine circuits. Terror-driven, Jacqueline stepped back into the hall and looked for an exit. She tried to reason with it. Please let me go. I just want to go home. Please. The voice droned on, closer and closer.

Suddenly something had her hands. Her fingers bent back and snapped like twigs, sending pain, shooting up her arms. She screamed in agony as the unseen attacker continued, to her around her waist and pulled at her, dragging her down the hall. Jacqueline began to kick and fight at the invisible force that had her, but it did no good. She tried to scream again, and something icy cold covered her mouth.

She couldn't see it, but Jacqueline knew it was a hand forcing her screams and pleas for help to become muffled. She looked at the direction she was being forced to go and noticed it was taking her to the fire stairs. The door flew open as it dragged her to them. standing in the doorway was the same dark figure. I want you, Jacqueline. The figure turned and started to walk up the stairs with Jacqueline in tow, and as she was forced through the threshold of the fire door and it slowly shut behind her, she found herself in total darkness.

Jacqueline could tell she was being dragged up the stairs, that this was going to be her end, and that was confirmed as she reached the top and the front. figure turned and said, I have you, Jacqueline. A few weeks later, the hotel's maintenance worker responded to the water tanks on the roof. The lobby desk received several complaints about low water pressure and an odd taste that came from the water.

It wasn't a completely unusual complaint given the hotel's old plumbing, but as the maintenance worker made his way to the water tanks, he detected a rancid odor wafting on the breeze. He climbed the ladder and glanced inside Tank 4, then nearly fell from shock. Floating face down inside the tank was Jacqueline's pale, bloated body. No signs of foul play were discovered by the police, and except for her unusual behavior that had been caught on the security camera of the elevator, it appeared to be an accidental drowning. Exactly what took place in the final moments that led to the death of Jacqueline was. the subject of several debates, but ultimately it not only made the news, but it added to the dark and horrific history of the Cecil Hotel.

Your episode has come to an end. Thank you for spending time with us at the No Sleep Podcast. If you would like to learn how you can hear the full-length version of this episode, featuring many more stories, please visit Theosleeppodcast.com and click on the season Pass link. Purchasing a season pass will help support everyone who contributes to the podcast, and in return, you'll get 25 full-length episodes and three exclusive bonus episodes, all for only 1999. This is David Cummings. Thank you for listening, and join us again for the next episode of the No Sleep Podcast.