The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S4E03

Episode Date: June 29, 2014

It's episode 3 of Season 4. We have seven tales for you in this episode featuring stories about fiendish friends, haunted homesteads, and creepy collectors. The full episode features the following stories. The free version features only the first three tales.  "I Still Get Letters From My Dead Best Friend" written by S.P. Trance and read by Corinne Sanders. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:03:45) "Being a Detective Ruined My Marriage" written by Maggie Louise and read by Peter Lewis & Sophia Alesdair. (Story starts at 00:18:05) "Canadian Paranormal Investigator" written by Grant Dykstra and read by David Cummings. Music by Brandon Boone. (Might this story be true?) (Story starts at 00:28:55) "Peggy" written by Heidi Helmer and read by Jessica McEvoy. Music by Brandon Boone. (Story starts at 00:38:30) "Dust" written by Cameron Suey and read by Jeff Clement & Derek Jensen. Production, music, and sound design by Jeff Clement. (Story starts at 00:53:10) "Mama Was a Doll Collector" written by Lauren Meyers and read by Jessica McEvoy. (Story starts at 01:18:55) "The Hobbit Hole" written by William Dalphin and read by David Cummings & Jessica McEvoy. (Story starts at 01:31:50) Click here to learn more about the Never Sleep Again podcast Click here to learn more about Maggie Louise Click here to learn more about Peter Lewis Click here to learn more about Cameron Suey Click here to learn more about Jeff Clement Click here to learn more about Derek Jensen Click here to learn more about William Dalphin 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

The sunlight fades to dark. The freight freight. To give it to your fear, there will be no sleep. The no sleep pot. I thought about all the times in my room I had to break down, muffling my cries against the pillow so no one else in the house could hear. She stood on and approached me in her face and a dirty shirt in head. Josh, one of our crew members, began telling me that he felt as if the doorways were shrinking.

Patrick had been showering one night shortly after they had moved. moved in, he was leaning forward, rinsing the shampoo out of his long hair. And when he straightened up, he saw a young girl. He seemed composed sitting upright and proud, despite the pinprick bullet hole clean of bloodless, standing starkly in the center of his throat. Every day after school, I would take the bus home by a mom in the lounge talking to one of her dolls. When I spotted an enormous spider web guarded by a large spider. It's episode three of season four. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Cummings. We have seven tales for you in this episode, featuring stories about fiendish friends, haunted homesteads, and creepy collectors.

I'm proud to introduce a new contributor to the podcast on this episode. Jeff Clement is a very talented producer of audio horror stories. He's a narrator, a musician, and sound designer. He's a regular contributor. to Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, and he's also from my home province of Ontario, so Canada is well represented on this show. Jeff is sharing one of his productions with us tonight,

and I'm thrilled to have his high quality of work on the show. Make sure you check the show notes for links to Jeff's YouTube channel for more of his excellent productions. I know a lot of our listeners are always on the lookout for other sources of audio horror fiction, and sites that deal with the spooky world of the paranormal and supernatural. Fan of the show, Brendan Dean asked me to let you know that he has a new site and podcasts that might pique your interest. His site is over at never sleep again.org, and the Never Sleep Again podcast recently launched.

Make sure you stop by and have a look and listen to his collection of true and fictional scary stories, articles about all matters terrifying or paranormal, and e-books with dozens of scary stories, true tales, and articles. You can find a link to Brendan's site in the show notes. Now, before you go check out all the great new content out there, let's share our stories with you and start the show. In our first tale, we meet two girls who are childhood friends. When family commitments cause one friend to move away, their bond remains strong.

But as author SP Trance writes, One friend tries to push their bond of friendship to an extreme place, and it forces both girls into some very dark roles. Narrator Corinne Sanders reads the tale for us about how one of the girls explains how, I still get letters from my dead best friend. I don't remember how I first met Holly. She was one of those people that seemed to always have been my friend. Something I do remember, however, is the first time I came to her house.

She carried around notebooks and would let almost anyone read, but when I got to her room, I realized how deep her obsession ran. There was paper all over the walls, ripped out pages from notebooks, sticky notes, everything. There was a pile of notebooks on her dresser almost bigger than the section at the store. What are you even write? I had asked. Stories, things, stuff I think. I later came to know that a majority of her writing pursuits were dedicated to chronicling

nearly every single thought that ran through her head. This was around the time the internet came to be a primary form of social interaction. with chat rooms and social media sites being in the interest of nearly every teenager at our school. Holly prided herself on never having any social media, deciding to do it the old-fashioned way, with a pen put to paper and a trip to the post office. After Holly moved away due to her mom's work, we kept in touch by letters. She sent them to me all the time, me a little bit less so.

I urged Holly to get on social media, get an email or something. something, but she wouldn't have it. There's magic in the written word, she used to say. We talked to each other for almost a year this way, until the little pink envelopes I got her letters and became lesser and lesser. I couldn't help but be disappointed when my dad got the mail and there wasn't any sign of a pink envelope standing out against the white. Her letters were always long, usually two or three pages in length, talking about her life, what was new, how she was. How she was, she was feeling, what she was thinking. As the letters came less frequently, they got shorter. One time I got a letter that was only one line long. Sad things seem a little sadder now.

I miss you. When I talked to my parents about our drifting apart, they asked if I'd like to spend a month at her house over summer vacation as long as her mom agreed to it. Her mom agreed. I sent Holly a letter. The day came and my heart was beating so fast when I stood in front of their house gripping my suitcases. A month, a whole month with Holly. She came out of the house with a huge grin on her face and ran and wrapped her arms around me. Her skin had gotten even darker in the never-ending sun. I missed you so much, she said. Me too, I said.

I never realized how long. lonely she was, living in that house with only her mom, who had to work a majority of the time to support the both of them. No wonder she was so immersed in writing. That night we spent hours staying up late talking about everything we didn't say in our letters. I noticed that there was no writing on her walls anymore. When I asked to see some of her notebooks, she grew hostile and refused. It was strange. She had always been so open about everything. It was nearly dawn. Polly had fallen asleep on the bed only an hour before.

I had spent that hour trying to decide whether or not I should go read her notebook she kept so secret. I decided I'd do it. I got up from my mattress on the floor. I was staying in her room for a few days until they finished painting the guest room and went over to her dresser. I chose a notebook at random and flipped through the pages. It didn't take long to find what it was about. They were all suicide letters. Some of them were long.

Some of them were short like the letter she had sent me once, and all of them absolutely terrified me. I told you not to read those, I heard Holly say. I closed a notebook and sat at the edge of her bed. I asked her why she would want to commit suicide. I mean, I knew she was sad. I could tell from her letters, but killing herself? She had rolled her eyes as if it didn't mean anything.

The most exciting thing one can do with their life is end it. She kept throwing around these bullshit pseudo-intellectual quotes to mask her real feelings. What was I going to do when I left? I asked her this, begged her not to die, to get help. But she just laughed and said, Don't leave. Kill yourself with me. We can be the lesbian version of Romeo and Juliet.

The month passed by and we both didn't talk about what happened on that morning. We spent the first two weeks hanging out with her friends and going to the pool, but for the most part, we sat in her room and talked. When the subject of suicide came up again, it was only a week until I had to go home. We were both on her bed. talking. It had gotten silent the past couple minutes until she said, If I asked, would you do it with me? Do what? I asked.

Die. Holly. Yes or no? I thought about it. I thought about all the times in my room I had a breakdown, muffling my cries against the pillow so no one else in the house would hear. Ever since Holly moved away, things seemed to be gradually falling apart, and I was leaving so soon. We would have to go back to communicating by letters again. I'll think about it, I whispered. It didn't take long for her to convince me. Holly's mom owned a gun. It was kept in a little drawer with a lock on it in the garage.

Holly knew where the key was. Okay, so. She took a deep breath. You shoot me first, then you shoot yourself. Promise? I nodded. She said those words so casually. You were going to do it on the day before I had to leave.

When the time came, we were sitting down on the floor of her bathroom, the cheap light above us buzzing. I had the gun in my trembling hands. I held it against her forehead, imagining what she would look like after I pulled the trigger. I hovered my finger above it, waiting for Holly to tell me to shoot. Do it. She breathed. I did it. And then I was too afraid to do it again. Years passed by, but I never forgot about Holly.

The police never found out about what I did. I had wiped her blood off of my face and changed my clothes before calling 911. I had wiped my fingerprints off of the handle of the gun. The police weren't suspicious for long. I guess they wouldn't think that the girl who was crying non-stop would ever be the one that murdered her best friend. I took her notebook where she had written her previous entries depicting our plans. I took it back home, terrified that anyone would find it. I kept it for years, had it hidden in the back of my closet, where I never dared to open it again.

I had started a new life after what happened that summer. I graduated high school, went to college, and did my best to forget. I have a job now. I've gotten so much better. Melissa, my girlfriend, I was on daily runs. On the way back, she usually gets the mail. One day, about a year ago, she asked if the pink envelope that came in the mail was for me. I had almost snatched the thing from her hands.

Same shade of pink, same size. It was one of Holly's envelopes, and written on the back with curly cursive handwriting. From Holly, the envelopes came almost every week. Usually they contained a letter inside. The letters were always one of the ones Holly sent me all those years ago when we were apart. I had burned those letters. Who's sending you all those pink envelopes? Melissa asked after about a month.

An old friend, I said. It wasn't a lie. Melissa didn't ask me any more questions. She wasn't one of those interrogative types. I liked that about her. It was hard to fall asleep at night. My days were so consumed with worrying about what would happen to me and whether or not anyone would find out about what I did all those years ago.

Two parts of me were torn between thinking that the letters came from someone that knew what happened and the possibility that they came from Holly herself. Eventually the letters didn't show up just in the mail. Sometimes they would appear randomly. under my pillow, on my window sill, on one of the plants in the garden. There were countless times where I would walk in a room and there would be a little pink envelope waiting for me. When I checked in my closet for Holly's last notebook, it was gone.

I had a breakdown at that point. I tried everything I could to get her to leave me alone. Blessing the house, burning sage. None of it worked. The letters would stop for about a week and then come again twice as bad as before. Melissa thought I was turning into one of those religious nets. Thankfully, our work schedules were set up so that she was never home before me. When I woke up, I would look around the house and get all the letters I could find,

and when I got back from work, I would do the same. I shredded all of them and threw the pieces away. It didn't help. Sometimes I would try to communicate with Holly When I was home by myself I would scream to the ceiling And ask her what she wanted I wrote her my own letters that I put in places around the house Hoping for some sort of reply

I even used one of those Ouija boards It didn't work well I laid my fingers on the planchette And all it spelled out was XOXO XO XO XO XO XO after going still and never moving again. One morning when I got out of the shower there was writing on the steamed mirror. We will be. Smiling face, the letters have stopped coming now.

Instead, about once a week I get nightmares. They're always about her. Her face after I shot her, her mouth filled with blood repeating, The most exciting thing one can do with their life is ended. Over and over and over again, faster and faster until her voice starts to become sort of warped until it's nothing but a high-pitched sound beating itself against my skull

and I wake up covered in cold sweat. Are you okay? Melissa sometimes whispers to me in the dark. Nightmare, I whisper back. It's okay, she says. squeezing my hand. They're not real. Oh, how I wish that would be so.

Sometimes the nightmares are a bit different. It's a repetition of what happened on the night I shot her, except in the nightmares I keep my promise. As soon as I pull the trigger against my head, I wake up. She took my notebook. She could have somehow gotten it to the police. I could have been caught. But I don't think me in prison is what will make it all end.

She won't stop until I pull the trigger. It's hard to imagine the kind of stress a job like being a police officer can have on one's life. Now imagine the impact a job like that could have on a marriage. As author Maggie Louise explains, When a cop begins a particularly disturbing case, it ends up causing a serious rift between he. and his wife. Narrators Peter Lewis and Sophia Alistair read the tale for us as we learn exactly why

being a detective ruined my marriage. Being a detective ruined my marriage. Okay, so maybe as a final result I was the one who inevitably ruined my marriage. But being a detective on an elite police force in a huge city, didn't make it any better. Sure, you look at marriage and divorce rates and see that some of the happiest couples took a nosedive over financial issues,

and as far as our relationship went, being on the police force caused us no financial turmoil. My wife got to stay at home, clean the house, go to bed, you know, on her own. And I guess that's what caused the end of our marriage. but every event leading up to it contributed as well. Being a detective in a large city not only caused my marriage to slip downward, but also caused my sleeping patterns to become destroyed.

I was sleeping a lot at the station, which we can't really call sleeping, more like I would have some breaks here and there, and during those breaks I would set an alarm, allow myself to doze off, only to be woken up abruptly 30, minutes later, be forced back to work, I was the best on their team. How could I let them down? And as far as allowing my personal life and any of this, not a chance, if you even so much as appeared out of it, you were sent home for the day, and they'd keep their eye on you. Like I said, it was an elite job, and I tried to stay under the radar, if such a term exists, for a detective.

Anyway, somewhere in there I made my wife paranoid and unable to see me as the man she married happily only years prior. Maybe it was the fact that we had no time for kids. But no, that couldn't be it. She knew she was getting into that lifestyle when she married me. I suppose I was leaving her alone at the house quite a bit. To her own thoughts, to nothing. I mean, how can a person be happy when they're missing out on their husband, and inevitably a social life as well.

And not only that, but on the off chance that I would be permitted to spend a night sleeping in my own bed, curled up to her, she would usually wake me up in the middle of the night, saying I was scaring her, and she didn't like that. You see, I was a sleepwalker. Not of the bizarrely violent kind, but there were a few times she caught me waking up, walking out of the room, and would follow me to the kitchen to see that I was fumbling through the night.

knife drawer. Take it as you may. A sleepwalker is a sleepwalker, and each one is unique, but I can see where that would be a bit off-putting to her. I was put on a case in August of 2010 that I became highly interested in right off the bat. The little girl that the story revolved around was given the alias Elaine. Elaine was 11 years old and belonged to a wealthy family. Up until the time of her death, she had always been well taken care of, as described by family members and friends. I met with Elaine's parents on several occasions, two wealthy doctors who took their little girl to an elite daycare for older children when their work schedules clashed. My investigation delved further, meeting with the owners of the place where she hung out frequently,

all the friends she made. The conclusion was this. Somebody was either very, very important. aggressive toward Elaine or very aggressive toward her parents. The assessment was that somebody took the time to stealthily crawl the ivy up to Elaine's window and stab her multiple times while she slept. The scene was gruesome. I can attest to the fact that it was, and I didn't even have to be there. The photographs were enough for these eyes. I do believe my wife understood the overtime and the way that the Elaine case must have taken a toll on me, but yet I had to be understanding of her as well, and I didn't have the time to hear her complaints or accusations on the whole ordeal.

You see, as I took on possibly the biggest case of my life, my wife started to accuse me of cheating. Her evidence? Me being weird. Her first sliver of evidence came one night as I burst through the doors of our home, extremely tired and ready to crash for the five hours I was granted until I had to go back to the station. I expected her to be in bed already, but I came into a brightly lit studio apartment and saw her sitting with her head in her hands on the couch, something I've never seen my wife do. Her foot was tapping much too steadily, too quickly to be the beat of a worried wife.

She stood up and approached me with detest on her. her face and a dirty shirt in hand. It was one of my old t-shirts that I sometimes wore to bed, and it was covered in scrapes, tears, and weeds, like somebody had gone and dragged it across an entire park from the back of a car. My eyes lit up, and I asked her where she got that, to which she responded. Well, I found it stuffed in the back of your closet while I was cleaning today. What happened to it? And why was it hidden? Of course, I had no explanation, and I told her it must have been from a while ago, gotten dirty and pushed back there.

She continued to explain that she cleaned my closet all the time and that it couldn't have been. We went to sleep facing opposite walls in bed that night. For the next week, I spent much of my time talking to individual children at the teenage daycare Elaine's parents had her hang out at. Apparently it was a large building where only doctors or people in the medical field could drop off their children when they didn't trust or have a babysitter. Some of the best caretakers in the city worked there, watching children anywhere from one to 13 years old. Elaine had been coming there for years and oftentimes hung out in the arcade with the oldest of the children, staying out of trouble and becoming well-liked as the years went on. Her close-knit group of friends attested to the fact that she was the sweetest girl that they had ever met.

Mostly hung out with the older girls, stayed away from boys as if she wore a repellent, and loved playing with dolls. She was a sweet, innocent kid who did pretty well in school and was close to her family. It seemed at this point that it was a random killing. I gathered some identifying things from her bedroom and tried to continue piecing together a case. One thing I discovered was that in mostly all of the pictures she had hung around her room of herself with friends and family, she was wearing a locket with a flower on it. Her mother frantically told me that was right and agreed that it was strange that her body was found with the locket nowhere in sight. It was something she constantly wore, even to bed, a locket that her grandmother had given to her. The locket wasn't anywhere in her room on the day of her.

her murder and its whereabouts were unknown. Things continued to drastically fail with my wife. She refused to acknowledge my presence in the house on the days I was home and continued to turn away from me in bed until she finally started sleeping on the couch against my judgment. To me, I wasn't able to get inside her head, so I classified it all in the realm of ridiculous and wondered why in the hell my wife would be acting like this all over some crusty worn shirt she found in the back of my closet with no explanation of how it got that way. Then one day I came home to the same scene, only this time she burst the moment when I walked through the door. You are cheating on me, aren't you? As she strode across the floor toward me, my heart plummeted into my stomach.

a feeling I don't ever want to experience again. Honey, what are you talking about? I know I haven't had the time to sleep much here at home, but you know I'm so busy at work. No. She interrupted, glaring at me with angry eyes and gritted teeth. This time I found the evidence. And with that, she pulled a necklace out of her pocket,

dangling from a silver chain, old and bruised with a flower on it, a locket with a flower, a dirty shirt, a dirty t-shirt from climbing up an ivy-covered wall in the middle of the night, maybe without even knowing, maybe while sleepwalking. She asked for a divorce, and I asked to resign for. from the case. There are few things more creepy than old abandoned hospitals. Imagine having a job where you're required to investigate places like that for signs of supernatural activity. As writer Grant Dykstra explains, he was tasked with finding out why strange noises were coming out of an old Edmonton Hospital. What he and his team found led to an odd and quite possibly true,

encounter with something very dark. But then again, what do you expect would happen when you're a Canadian paranormal investigator? My crew and I had received a phone call from an Edmonton residence from the west side of the city, complaining about the bizarre amount of screaming that can be heard in her neighborhood. She said that there was an old condemned hospital near where she lived. She then went on about how people say that it's just crackheads and homeless people screaming, but it all seemed a little off. She asked us if we could do some research on the Charles Camsel Hospital.

Abandoned in 1996 due to asbestos, the movie White Coats was filmed there in 2004. So I thought to myself, if... If there's a movie that was shot there two years ago, it's probably not that bad. But then I started to Google the place, and dozens of stories started popping up. This grabbed my attention as I started learning more and more about its dark past. The hospital had a sterilization section that looked like it was straight out of 28 weeks later. I then consulted with the team and we decided to take a look at the place. After some painful negotiations, the property owner at the time agreed that he would give us two hours to explore floors two and three of the hospital.

Apparently the basements have been flooded, so the upper floors were really our only option. At around 11 p.m., the three of us were escorted by two extorted by two exquisite. exterior security guards into one of the garages in the side of the building. Then they explained to us that this is the only entrance into the building because the rest of the doorways have been sealed with barbed wire to keep the homeless population out. I then thought about how the old lady mentioned that there were screams coming from the hospital. If the place was sealed with barbed wire, how could anyone have gotten inside?

One of the security guards said, Check out the North Wing. That's my favorite place. As he winked, I started getting pretty nervous as we approached the door to the main hallway. This was where the security guards left us. There was nothing in the rooms. Everything had been disposed of.

Just pipes and electrical wiring here and there. There was graffiti. sprayed all over the floors and walls. It was just your typical messages. 666, I'm going to murder you. Leave us alone. Just your typical abandoned place nonsense. Our crew decided to stick together the entire time, since we didn't know the area very well. Then we headed to floor two. As I walked to walk to up the staircase, I felt chills run down my back for no apparent reason. The place wasn't really that scary. It looked as if it could open tomorrow, minus the vandalism. Josh, one of our crew members, began telling me that he felt as if the doorways were shrinking. I never saw that,

though. What I did see was what looked like blood in one of the rooms. We went and checked it out, but we couldn't tell if it was blood or smeared paint, but it had that metallic smell that blood gives off. Stephen, my other crew members, said we should get out of here and report it to the owner, but I said not until we check out the north side. We climbed up the next set of stairs and walked to the north side of the hospital. floor three is when we began to hear the cries of babies and women as we got closer to the north wing it seemed like screaming louder and louder and louder my crew wanted to leave but i was so curious about what was in the north wing when we came to its doors we decided that we were going to have a safe word and if anyone said the safe word, we would all run back to the North Wing doorway to safety. Our safe word was

monkey piss. We all took a deep breath and began to explore. It seemed just like the other floor except for the occasional scream or cry of an infant. I came across a sign on a doorway that chilled me to the fucking bones. This was, in fact, the maternity ward. We all heard a voice crying for help. Being really fucking careless, we decided to follow the voice. We were led into a massive foyer.

I thought I saw a pile of people in the middle, but as I got closer, I could make out that they were, in fact, just mannequins, all with bleeding eyes. I then thought this is some stupid joke. The security guards pulled on us, and we all began to laugh. Then we heard a loud, high-pitched voice scream. Then the pile of mannequins burst into flames, which turned into a massive inferno. Stephen then screamed.

I screamed, monkey piss, motherfucking monkey piss! And we booked it to the North Wing entrance. When we all met up, we vaulted out of the hospital as fast as we could. Once we got out of the hospital, we continued to run onto the field facing the hospital. We then collapsed and watched the fire engulfed the third and fourth floors. It wasn't long until firefighters were on the scene. They couldn't enter the building because of all the barbed wire, so it looked like a difficult fire to fight.

You could hear screams of women and children coming from the place as it burned. The voices soon after began to turn almost demonic. One of the firefighters even asked the owner if there were people inside. When the owner found us in the field, he began freaking out. We explained to him what happened, and he said the mannequins were on the fifth floor last time he checked. He told us he would cover up the story, saying it was a demolition malfunction. And, as you would imagine, the authorities believed him. The fire went out after a few hours, leaving the maternity ward charred and covered in ashore.

I've never even returned to Edmonton since then. Even though it's a massive place with a population of a million people, it's too horrific to believe that the hospital still stands to this day, gazing over the city. Demolition malfunction, my ass. Our 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 the no-sleeppodcast.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.