transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:01] This week's episode is brought to you by Well Go USA's new creature feature horror, The Yeti, only in AMC Theaters April 4th and 8th and on digital April 10th. When an oil tycoon and a famous adventurer disappear into the frozen wilderness of Northern Alaska, a handpicked rescue team ventures in to bring them home. But they're not alone. They've crossed into the Yeti's territory and the brutal elements are the least of their worries. Packed with blood splattered suspense, a towering beast and gruesome practical effects, the Yeti is a throwback to the glory days of monster movies. Starring Brittany Allen, Eric Nelson, Jim Cummings, William Sadler and Corbin Bernstein, don't miss it. The Yeti, only in AMC Theaters April 4th and 8th, and on digital April 10th.
Speaker 2:
[00:48] Hey everyone. Okay, don't skip this. It's your chance to win. We're currently celebrating the 5th year of Creepy Boy Camp. And to spice things up, we've teamed up with Torchbearer Sauces to give away a pack of hot sauces to five lucky winners. You might even recognize some of Torchbearer's iconic flavors from Hot Ones or our own Bloody Disgusting podcast. To enter is simple. Just find our show on Instagram at Creepypod and look for the pin to post for more details. Giveaway runs from April 15th to the 30th, so enter soon. Again, you can find more information by searching Creepypod on Instagram. No.
Speaker 3:
[01:30] This is Creepy. A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous, chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 4:
[02:10] Okay, everyone ready to go?
Speaker 2:
[02:13] Go where? Wait, you are leaving, are you?
Speaker 5:
[02:16] No, it's a beautiful night. We were just going to go do some stargazing.
Speaker 6:
[02:21] Wait, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 5:
[02:24] Stargazing? Why?
Speaker 6:
[02:26] Oh, stargazing. Never mind.
Speaker 5:
[02:30] Wait, what did you think we were going to do?
Speaker 6:
[02:34] Oh, it's nothing.
Speaker 2:
[02:36] I don't know. Sounds like the setup for a story to me. What you got against stargazing?
Speaker 6:
[02:42] Oh, it's not stargazing. It's just gazing. And to be clear, I haven't done it in a long time. As a kid, we used to move around a lot. It's just that, well, don't go gazing. This is a copy of something I've written and posted all over the internet. The websites, subreddits and discord servers relating to the hobby have long been found and shut down. There aren't many of us anymore, let alone those both young, sane and tech savvy enough to navigate the internet. But I know for a fact that my old friends that may or may not still gaze still frequent these sites. For obvious reasons, I'd rather not go back into direct contact with them. This is also a general warning for anyone in the state of Utah. Do not go gazing near Park City. Two things, in case anyone gets curious enough to look it up and not take my warning seriously. One, gazing is watching people in their homes. Never interacting, never doing anything to affect a person or their property. It's illegal of course, but most of the people that gaze do so from outside of the property. They use this as a legal and moral excuse to justify their curiosity. Though most of the hobbyists claim that as long as you're on public property, you aren't breaking any sort of law by watching someone's house. Two, Park City is a place near Salt Lake City in Utah, high up in the mountains. It's a place prided as the home of the Sundance Film Festival, which isn't the case anymore, but for a long time, it was quite the claim to fame and the Winter Olympics back in the early 2000s. The place has a lot of money invested in it, which leads to a lot of big isolated houses among the mountains where owners don't bother drawing the shades or just as bad, ignoring that you can see their silhouettes as long as the lights are on unless you have some very thick curtains in front of your windows. Gazing only has three rules that are actually quite outspoken. You only have a few hours to watch and wait for something exciting. You cannot leave any sort of evidence of your presence. You can never go back to the place you've already been. Gazing is a short-lived hobby, and it's well understood that anyone who breaks these rules or goes homeless trying to find new places to watch winds up jumping down the rabbit hole and getting caught. I never did. Not until last night. My idea was genius. Usually I went up into the lower hills and outcrops around Salt Lake City itself, but it was a hard trip. Any time you gaze, it usually means an overnight trip to a specific neighborhood. That meant you either needed a car with nothing discernible about it or rely on public transportation, which I often did. But a trip to Park City? Hell, I could drive up there myself and make a nice staycation out of it, spending a week in a nice hotel with three of the seven days dedicated to a long trip gazing down the mountains around town. The best part was that I had a way to make it almost too easy of an effort. The Alpine Slides. Basically, big long concrete slides that wind down the mountain. Renting the wheeled cart needed to use the slides was expensive, but I didn't need one. Just the ticket up the chairlift. After a day of enjoying a nice hotel and some pretty fun local bars, I parked my car at the end of a certain neighborhood and took a bus back to the Alpine Slides. I took the last of the day up to the highest slide on the mountain. What I thought to be the most dangerous gamble of the night was jumping off of the chairlift and dashing into the forest lugging my pack stuffed with slipdash camping essentials. My insides were in tight knots, but I managed to make the jump while the chairlift was near the ground. I got up and ran, not bothering to check if anyone had seen me. I dove sliding into the bushes near the trees and stayed still. I hadn't seen any cameras on the chairlifts, but I made a bet that if there were any, they weren't being watched particularly closely. I waited in the bushes for an entire hour, crawling east towards the neighborhood that I'd spotted on Google Maps. It was a long, winding neighborhood marked with big houses. This is how you know the people that owned them were loaded, in massive driveways. Best of all, the mountain seemed to slope in a way that I could comfortably and constantly walk downhill in the thick forest surrounding the houses, listening to music while I gazed. The sound of an engine came from behind me. I looked back, making sure not to move my body too quickly. A group of security guards rode on ATVs up the mountain towards the slide I'd just bailed from. I'd gotten high enough to see where the chairlift I'd abandoned ended up. A large concrete platform with the slide stretching down towards the opposite side of the mountain. A few employees, I think of the nearby hotel, stood waiting for the security guards. I pulled out my binoculars and watched them. My entire body clenched when the group turned toward the forest I was hiding in. One of the employees shook their heads and said something that made the rest laugh. The guards went back down the mountain, while the hotel employees got to reap a pretty good benefit of their job, getting to slide down after every shift to clock out and go home. Shivering, I put my binoculars back into my pocket and risked standing up. I had crawled far enough into the trees to be completely hidden, or at least I hoped. This part of the journey, hiking a few miles towards the neighborhood, was the riskiest part. Getting caught by the hotel would be bad, but getting caught near a public road that I could claim I was in the middle of jogging got me out of felony territory and towards a petty misdemeanor. But god damn, it was a beautiful walk. Squirrels and birds seemed to be everywhere, and the scent of the alpine, a unique blend of fir trees, pines and sagebrush, was intoxicating. Even if I didn't see anything exciting when I gazed, this renegade hike through the mountains was more than enough of a thrill to make the trip worth it. A few hours later, I rounded a hill and I was finally at my destination. It was pretty much a huge conclave depression within the mountain that had large houses with even larger yards winding down through the forests that were being overtaken by civilization. Meticulously sculpted pavements snaked down towards the west side of what I'll call the pit. Every quarter of a mile, a three, occasionally four story house split off from the roads. It would have been a nightmare to navigate if there wasn't a consistent pattern on the leftmost neighborhoods. A clear path of forests that would cover me while also being directly across from many of the houses that wound down the pit. At the very end, and I double checked this just to be safe, was a gate that let back out into the public park near Park City proper. My car was parked at the edge of said park. My binoculars came back out from my pocket. The sun was setting and there was a stretch of hill that I needed to walk down to start on my path down the pit. In the meantime, I thought I'd get some preliminary gazing out of the way. There was only one house that had lights on that I could see from the top of the pit. I say house, but it was really a mansion, hosting a party that filled the entire yard with a large pool, hot tub, a basketball court, and even two batting cages that took up a football field size section of land. People of all shapes, sizes, and colors mingled, ate food, and enjoyed the amenities. Nothing crazy or wild enough to warrant writing down at the time happened, but it was fun watching people have fun. After the sun started to set, the partiers began moving inside. I watched them go in trying to see what was going on in the mansion, but I was much too far away and elevated to get a good look. I wondered if they were going to break out the crack, molly and condoms after they went inside. I caught sight of a little girl in my binoculars following her parents inside. Now I hope to God the three things weren't a part of the party. I chuckled a bit, although I really did hope the people up there weren't that fucked, drank some water, and took one last look at the mansion. The little girl was standing just outside the wide mansion doors, looking towards me. Not at me, but way too damn close for comfort. There's an excellent science and learning based channel on YouTube that I keep up with. One of their episodes had been about horror and paranoia. I bring it up because I remembered when I was looking through those binoculars that there was a popular theory that you knew when you were being looked at due to specific rays of light that can emit from someone's eyes when they look at you. It was the only way I could explain my certainty that the girl was looking right at me. She wasn't, or at least I don't think she was. Even after everything that happened, I'm not sure. I am sure of the alarm that went off in my head that something was looking at me, even if it wasn't the little girl looking towards the hills where I was hiding. The girl turned away, took a sip from the pouch of juice she was carrying, and walked into the mansion that now flooded with life and light. She closed the door behind her, and that watched feeling finally went away. I felt cold and, for the first time since picking up the hobby, doubt. It didn't take much to shrug off that doubt, but I wrote what I'd seen down. The other guys and plenty of gals, believe it or not, in the hobby would get a kick out of the creep factor. By then, the sun had finally finished setting, and true darkness was in the pit. All of the houses were lit up, and from where I was it looked like a huge diorama of rich tiny plastic neighborhoods and forests. I took in the sights one more time before I took my night-vision goggles out of my backpack and started climbing toward the snaking path of forests that led down to the opening in the pit that led out to my car. It took half an hour of walking to reach the first house or rather its backyard. People were much less likely to give their backyard surroundings any mind, even with drapes over the window, like I've said, and that was even in a really populated area. Walking through a thick forest with night-vision goggles and a backpack full of food and wilderness survival equipment wasn't hard. What was hard was making sure I moved quietly. There are a few tricks to that, but I'm not sharing them. Despite how I've typed up until this point, I'm also going to tell you with my whole heart to not go gazing. At all. Besides the obvious moral reasons, what Reddit posts and blogs won't tell you is how often someone gets shot without even trespassing, never mind being put on a registry depending on who's living in the house when you actually get caught. But I won't lie to you. I didn't have that mindset until after I reached my car, bloody and bruised and exhausted the following morning. When I approached the big wide backyard of the first home on my trail, I was excited to see what I could glimpse. The night vision goggles came off and I sat comfortably against the hill and I gazed at the wildest party I'd ever seen. The backyard wasn't that large, but it was full of games, food and drinks everywhere there was room. Pool tables, ping pong tables and an inflatable sports area slash bouncy house. People were drinking, chatting and having an absolute blast. The house was a huge angular glass box marked with marble and granite with a gigantic wooden patio where even more people were sipping drinks and having fun and talking to each other. I don't go to a lot of parties but this would have been the exception. The only thing that really seemed odd was the second story of the house. Smoke and colored lights filled the air and unclothed sweaty people were flowing and undulating like the heavy wisps of smoke and incense that surrounded them. The entire site gave me an excited longing feeling. People were walking in and out of the house, greeting people they hadn't seen before constantly and with drinks or food. I felt a genuine urge to sneak in and mingle, take advantage of the situation and have some fun. It was probably going to be my last gazing trip anyway and there were a few people on the edge of the lawn nearest to me that were wearing the kind of clothes I had on. I probably could have done it. I slid my night vision goggles back on and turned away from the party. I had a few urges as I made my way around the trees, leaves and bushes to go back. Lord knew that I wanted a reason to cut loose. Honestly, I still couldn't give you the exact reason why I ignored the party other than that I was just too scared to be even a little more risky than I already had been. A quarter of a mile down the forest I saw a small and cheap looking apartment building made with red brick. Four wide and obscured windows were evenly spaced out along its backside, though I couldn't see a door coming out from the small concrete patio or from the sides of the building. I settled down, sat against the hill and gazed. After a few minutes of twiddling my thumbs and listening to music, a light came on from the top left window. A shape moved through the room, approached the window, then pulled it open. It was a blonde woman in jeans and a T-shirt. After she had slid the window open, she frowned and leaned out towards the backyard. Hey, you! She whispered so loudly that she might as well have yelled. I stopped breathing. Hey, come on, I know you're out there. My breathing came back, but only enough to keep me conscious. My heartbeat was a heavy pulse that I felt throughout my entire body. Panic was only held back by the fact that she wasn't looking directly at me. Rather, she was looking all around the forest. She didn't know where I was, but she knew I was there. Come on, please? She whispered, yelled, motioning towards the house. We don't get hikers up here very often. At least tell me which trail you're heading towards. I didn't say anything, didn't even blink. Had she tracked me on the mountain? Maybe I'd set off some sort of alarm, even though I'd been keeping an eye out. I'm gonna call the cops if you don't show yourself. I almost broke. I wasn't born with a silver tongue, but I figured that if I had to, I could have passed off as a hiker. Looking back, I probably would have, but even more than the alertness I felt at being spotted, there was an odd twist to my gut that I felt when I looked at the woman continuing to whisper and at one point even started a one-sided conversation trying to get me to reply. At the time, only one thing felt really off to me, her room. Her room or the room she was standing in at least was completely empty. The walls were cracked in yellow, both from the old paint and the dim used bulb that hung naked from a simple plug in the ceiling. A string hung down from it. There was no light switch near the door. Yet the light had come on before I saw any movement in the room. Very very slowly I started to move my way down the forest. The light in the room wasn't nearly strong enough to reach where I was, but I played it as safe as I could. She continued to whisper until I was almost out of earshot. This is one of the few things from that night that I don't vividly remember, but I would swear that after a certain distance, she stopped talking entirely. Just when she went quiet, the light went off. Keeping my hands and legs from shaking was almost impossible. The only way I kept it together was a simple fact. If I was being tracked or had been spotted, I needed to keep an eye out for anything that would give that or me away. It had felt like hours before I saw the next backyard, but it must have taken me fifteen or twenty minutes. Light suddenly shined in my eyes so brightly that I yanked my night vision goggles off and stared at the ground. All I could see was a pulsing white and red. Freeze! I heard a man shout from where I had seen the house. Put your hands where I could see them! The red and white flashing in my vision became tinted with blues as my sight came back. Floodlights and police cruiser lights spinning on top of cars marked Park City Sheriff's Department. I don't know what would have happened if I'd surrendered. My gut tells me that I'm only breathing as I type this because I happened to be behind a larger tree when the lights had come on. Two things I heard out of the cacophony of shouts I heard were, get up from the ground and we will open fire. I've never been arrested and the only experience I have with cops was watching the titular show when I was younger and clips on the Internet. But even in my panic state of mind, I knew that cops didn't immediately threaten to shoot a trespasser just for trespassing and get up from the ground. I was standing straight up behind a tree. I ignored all of my instincts and waited. The cops continued to shout, warning me that they were going to open fire if I didn't come out with my hands up. The longer I waited, the more scared I became. Not because the voices were getting louder or closer, rather that they stayed the same. Being conservative, I must have stood behind that tree for at least half an hour. Yet no shots rang out. No noises of foliage being pushed aside as the cops approached me or fanned out to look for me. But the shouting continued. The floodlights and police lights blaring together and making an odd mixing of swirling colors into the trees. What got me moving after another 15 minutes was boredom, if I'm being honest. Not real boredom. I don't think my heart rate or breathing got any slower while I was expecting to get shot, but I did realize that whatever was happening wasn't going to stop. So I tried sneaking forward, low to the ground, in the shadow of the tree I'd been hiding behind. I'd barely made it five feet when one of the floodlights swung directly towards me. There he is! Fire! I ran, slow and cumbersome-like, because of my backpack, but still as fast as I could. Sharp, loud cracks came from the direction of the yard. The police kept yelling, telling me to duck, freeze, to get the fuck down and come back. I kept running. The light was doing one thing in my favor, letting me see what was ahead of me. I had no cohesive thoughts at the time, just the need to go downhill as hard and as fast as I could. Any moment a cop could get a lucky hit in. Only later I realized why I wasn't shot. I couldn't have been shot, at least not by any self-respecting cop that had ever held a gun before. With a target as large and slow as I was, it would have been harder to miss me than not. Like I said, I didn't think about it at the time. I didn't have any thoughts, just a head full of adrenaline that was doing its best to ignore the pain in my arms and legs from the running and praying that I'd get to see the next sunrise. They didn't chase me. I kept running long past the reach of any of the lights until I ran face first into a birch tree. My vision was a blur as I fell to the ground, rolling down the incline until I came to a sudden stop against another tree that caught me right in the abdomen. What air I had left in my lungs was knocked out. After a very painful forced rest on the ground, my breathing came back to me. It hurt, and so did my nose that wasn't broken and that ran with blood. But I managed to claw my way to a standing position next to the tree that had both saved me and given me a huge bruise on my midsection. If it hadn't, the odds were more than likely that I would have broken something farther down the hill. The only thing that had broken was one of my night vision goggles lenses. Still, I was grateful that I had that much. It and the compass that pointed directly toward the pit's exit was all I needed to run in a straight downward line as fast as I could to get the hell out of the trees. My days of gazing were over, to say the least. One step down, it started to rain. Despite the urgency I felt in every atom of my body, I looked up towards the sky confused. There hadn't been any clouds before, and there weren't any now. The stars shone bright even if a bit muted from the nearby city's light pollution. I couldn't actually see where the rain was coming from, but I swear it was there. A smaller and much creepier detail that I thought about a ways down the hill was that the rain was falling everywhere, including under canopies of leaves that rain naturally ran down to leave the trunks of trees dry. I ignored it. Actually, the smell of ozone and forest rain calmed me down a little. It wasn't much compared to the growing strain on my body and my clothes getting soaked and really uncomfortable, but it was something. There was one more house on my straight shot to the pit's exit, even with my straight run through the forest. I would have ignored it if the light from the backyard didn't sear it into my eye. Since I was so close to the exit back into Park City, my night vision goggles went back into my pocket. Unfortunately, an outcropping rose and split my path in a way where the much quicker route wound towards the house's backyard that I needed to follow, lest I had an hour to my time on the mountain. I went the faster and more dangerous route. The house's backyard was lit with a low firelight. There were people there, at least a dozen. Each was tied up on X-shaped St. Andrew's crosses. Connecting them all were confetti streamers. The torches blazing even in the rain spread across the yard only lit up the bodies on the crosses enough for me to get the barest look. Halfway around the awkward outcrop that I knew would let me out onto a street right next to the pit's exit, I realized that it wasn't streamers that connected all the crosses. Streamers weren't pink and fleshy with a tubular shape. I could finally see that the streamers were coming from and tied between each of the bodies. Before I could scream or more likely puke my guts out, I heard a sharp whisper near me from the right side of the yard. The cross closest to the end of the yard had a living person on it, a girl with one streamer already out and tied to another cross behind her. Two kids, teenagers, were trying to pull an iron stake out of one of the girl's feet. Hey, you! one of them whispered directly at me. Please, come help us, we're so close. Please? the other whispered, eyes darting between me and her friend as she sobbed. Please help! The edge of the yard was only a few steps away. The house, a large temple-looking one that was made of massive logs and full of windows, was completely dark. I took a few steps forward, not really sure if I was going to help or not, and tripped, falling face-forward. I reached towards the ground with all my might and dug my fingers into the hard dirt. One of my nails ripped off, but I slowed to a crawl mere inches from the edge of the yard. I had to bite down on the cuff of my jacket to keep from screaming. When I looked up, the kids were both staring at me, with a hunger and anticipation that was so powerful that they were smiling and holding their breaths as they watched my hand so near the border between the yard and forest with an eagerness I hadn't seen before or since. The girl tied up to the cross looked the same way. Only she was smiling ear to ear. Her eyes glowed in the firelight that she looked at me. I scrambled backwards up the hill and ran again, this time not even bothering with the night vision goggles. I ran and I ran, then I ran some more. Rain and tree branches scraped at my hands and face as I stumbled through the forest. Eventually I spilled out onto the black paved street. Ahead of me, with only one phosphorescent light to see it by, was a concrete guard post next to an iron gate that passed through the lowest edge of the pit. I'd made it. Next to the gate on a grassy hill that sloped down from a mansion I could barely see even without the night vision goggles was my car. Same color, license plate, everything. There was no doubt this was my car. I took a few shaky steps towards it, then stopped in the middle of the street. I pulled my keys out of my pocket and hit the lock button. Far to my right, past the iron gate, there was a distant honk as my car signaled that it had been locked. Nice try, I whispered, not even hearing myself. Looking back toward the pit, which now towered in front of me, I couldn't see anything of what I'd passed before, except for a house on the opposite side of where I'd climbed down from. Lights were flashing from the inside, red lights that looked like flames. My binoculars didn't come out of the backpack. I was much too tired and scared, if I'm being honest, to even do that. But I would swear that the girl I'd seen at the party through those same binoculars at the top of the pit, the one that was the last to enter the only normal house I'd seen throughout the night, was there, watching me. I climbed over the iron gate, found my real car, and got the hell out of there. I haven't been up to Park City since, nor do I intend to set foot near that place. All I did was double check the Google images of the pit, only to see that none of the houses I'd seen match the houses that were on the satellite images. Beyond that, my gazing days are done. My story is far from the only strange one that you get from talking to homeless people or Vega bonds on what they've seen come out of voyeurism. But nobody believed my story, so I'm posting it here. Don't go gazing near Park City. Or better yet, don't go gazing at all.
Speaker 2:
[30:58] Hey, everyone. So, if you've been listening to our Nutri-Fol ads for the last couple of months, you might know that I've called on some old acquaintances of mine that have had some, I'll say, follicular issues. Now, if that's something that's genetic or simply a side effect of subjecting oneself to the endless miasma of twisted pleasure and pain, who's to say? But while I hang around here, I wanted to remind you all that Nutri-Fol is the number one dermatologist recommended by the hair growth supplement brand, and it's the number one hair growth supplement brand personally used by dermatologists. Nutri-Fol's hair growth supplements are peer-reviewed, NSF certified for sport, and clinically tested. Stop waiting for all your wishes to come true in the form of a mystical puzzle box and do yourself a favor. Let your hair be one last thing to worry about. See visibly thicker, stronger, faster growing hair in three to six months with Nutri-Fol. For a limited time, Nutri-Fol is offering our listeners $10 off your first month subscription and free shipping when you visit nutrifol.com and enter promo code CREEPY10. That's nutrifol.com, spelled nutrafol.com, promo code CREEPY10. Hey, can someone let me down? The hooks are sliding into places. I don't much care for hooks to be. Hello? That's nutrifol.com and promo code CREEPY10. Duly noted. So you all still want to go stargazing?
Speaker 7:
[32:40] Yeah, definitely not in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2:
[32:44] Fair. Okay. Well, tell you what. Let me walk those of you who still want to go out to the open fields. Why?
Speaker 4:
[32:53] Are there booby traps or something?
Speaker 2:
[32:55] What? No. Don't be ridiculous. But in all seriousness, follow me closely, step where I step, and don't stray once we leave the edge of camp. You all signed your release forms on the bus, right? Yeah.
Speaker 5:
[33:14] I can't believe you're under duress. We were supposed to sign release forms to be here, and everyone willfully signed them.
Speaker 2:
[33:21] Okay. For the rest of you who are staying here, does someone have a story to tell?
Speaker 8:
[33:26] I do. It's actually on theme too. It's called Stars Below the Treetops. I was flat on my back in a field in the woods, and I was drowning in stars. It was just like our astronomy teacher, Miss Callahan, said it would be. All the constellations we'd seen on our star maps and planetarium visits and glimpsed through veils of clouds and city lights all arrayed above us. It was impossible not to think in cliches. They really were twinkling. They really were like diamonds in the sky. Almost everyone in my astronomy class had signed up for this end of the year field trip. We traveled deep into a state park far away from urban light pollution and set up camp in a huge open field. I had pitched a tent, but like most of the other kids, I had no intention of sleeping in it. I wanted to spend all night out here in the stars. But then my best friend Kendra jostled me and told me she had to show me something really important. I reluctantly got to my feet, weaving my way around all the other students lying on the ground. There were no artificial lights. Miss Callahan had threatened us with death if we used our phone flashlights for anything other than the direst emergency. And the field trip had been timed for a night when there was only the thinnest rind of the moon. But with my dark adapted eyes, I could see well enough. After all, the wide open sky was full of tiny suns. So full of suns, Miss Callahan always said, that it was impossible to believe we are alone. In the last few weeks of the school year, we had all given presentations on our responses to the Fermi paradox. The question is, given the multitude of stars and the likelihood of intelligent life existing, why haven't we encountered aliens yet? Kendra's presentation argued that we were the only intelligent life in our own galaxy, if not the universe. That nothing so unlikely as us could happen more than once. Mine was the most optimistic explanation. That our solar system was in a sort of zoo or nature preserve. That spacefaring aliens were avoiding contact with us to let us develop on our own until some indefinite future, when they might reveal themselves. Devin, the teacher's pet, got to present on what turned out to be Ms. Callahan's own belief about the Fermi Paradox. She talked about the Dark Forest Hypothesis. There were, or at least had been, all kinds of extraterrestrial civilizations. But any who revealed their existence were destroyed by more advanced or just more aggressive neighbors, hunters who stalked the dark skies. Maybe deep in the spiral of the Milky Way, where stars were closer together, some planet of killers had already laid waste to scores of other species. Maybe our place out here on the fringes of the galaxy just brought us a little more time than the intelligent life forms in denser clusters. Out here in this field surrounded by an actual dark forest, that idea seemed more plausible than all the others. Miss Callahan and the other chaperones didn't object when they saw Kendra and me walking away from the crowd. Us astronomy kids were about the nerdiest and most well-behaved teenagers you could imagine. And nobody who was on this field trip was looking for trouble. Besides, Kendra and I were headed in the direction of the restrooms, in an actual building with actual hot running water, an unimaginable luxury for a state park. To be honest, the bathroom was one of the main reasons a city kid like me had been willing to come on this trip. But Kendra led me past the restrooms and into the trees beyond. And I was so glad I had followed her. All I could do was gasp. I hadn't seen fireflies in years. Since that time we visited my grandma's house on the East Coast one summer when I was about four. All of a sudden, I was right back there in that memory. Grandma's backyard, the taste of the ice cream soda I got to have after dinner, the flashes in the dark, and then the juicy grass underneath my bare feet while I squealed and jumped after them, my dad trying to help me catch one. The murmur of the adults talking behind me, the clink of the ice cubes in their drink. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my mom and my grandma holding hands while they watched my dad and me. It hit me like a club, yearning for that past moment, when my parents were still together and grandma was still alive. I stumbled forward after the fireflies, wanting to catch one now, just as much as I had when I was four years old. As far as I knew, there weren't any fireflies like this within a few hundred miles. What were they even doing here? Climate change probably. But for once, this was a side effect I liked. There were more fireflies ahead of me every second, and I followed them into the forest. The leaves overhead chipped away at the soft light of the starry sky. My feet tangled in the underbrush, but I couldn't stop moving forward. It's a chilly kind of light, that yellowy green that fireflies emit. They were the opposite side of the color wheel from the sparks that fly from a campfire. I could picture them as embers floating out of some vortex of roiling, burning cold. I caught a glimpse of Kendra's face, uncanny in those spectral green flashes. My own hands, reaching forward, looked corpse-like. Dead things, but still grasping. Just ahead, the fireflies reached their destination. They gathered together, clinging to the underside of the canopy of leaves, not moving anymore and not blinking either, just emitting a steady glow. I gasped and sat down on a fallen log and tipped my head back. Something was teasing my brain about the very weird array of lights above me. Pattern recognition, a few of the fireflies were bigger and brighter than the others and made the shape of a rough W. Cassiopeia, and then I recognized other constellations in the lights clinging to the leaves. I felt something moving in my head that didn't belong to me, like a hand reaching into my brain, ruffling and rooting through the murky waters of memories. I certainly didn't have a photographic memory, but now this intruder fished up the most recent sight of the stars above me, unbearably sharp, unbearably detailed. The fireflies shifted their position above me. Kendra opened her hands, and more fireflies welled up from her palms. They arranged themselves along the canopy until, with a clockwork click, they formed the exact replica of the night sky I'd been staring at. Those aren't really fireflies, I said. Not a question, just to hear the sound of my own voice. Kendra shook her head. And you're not really her. At that, she seemed to let out a breath and relax. And whatever it was that made her look like my best friend fell away. I was sitting beside a vaguely humanoid bundle of shadows. And she was casually plucking things from my mind. What is all this? I gestured up at the lights above me, not really expecting an answer. The answer, when it did come, was in my own voice. Of course, she didn't have to bother pretending to be Kendra anymore. A map, she said. All the angles of one star to another, so that we will be the first to find you. What are you going to do? I asked, my voice shaky. That is nothing that you need to concern yourself with. You won't be around when we get there. Near the beginning of the last century, Ms. Callinan said, humans sent out their first radio broadcast. That broadcast has been traveling through space ever since, and has reached star systems as far as 119 light years away. That's not all that far in a galactic sense. Earth's radio signals won't reach the center of the galaxy for about another 27,000 years. But maybe the beings that were picking through my brain didn't need to wait for radio signals. Maybe they sensed us on a psychic level, on a wavelength that we don't understand, one that's not bound by the speed of the electromagnetic spectrum. Maybe they could use the alignments of our constellations to figure out exactly where we are. My fingers felt terribly cold. I flexed them just to make sure I could still move them under my own power. When I was a little child, I did end up catching a firefly. I had forgotten because I didn't really want to remember how that sweet memory had ended. I grabbed at the thing too hard and crushed it. My skin burned a little from the chemicals it released, but the reason I cried was because I hadn't want to hurt it. My grandmother, never the warmest person, did try to comfort me in her own way. It's okay, she said. If it hadn't been you, it would have been a bat or a frog. They're fragile little things. They never do last very long. Hey Jon.
Speaker 2:
[46:04] Hey Owen, glad to see you're still conscious. I kinda thought you shooting yourself in the neck would be a recurring theme. You wish. No, I really don't.
Speaker 9:
[46:15] Hey Jon, we were out walking earlier, and we noticed something strange.
Speaker 2:
[46:21] No you didn't.
Speaker 9:
[46:22] What?
Speaker 2:
[46:24] You didn't see anything. I mean, what do you think you saw?
Speaker 7:
[46:29] It looks like there's another camp up on the hill out there to the west.
Speaker 2:
[46:34] Oh, yeah, that's Camp Ridgeline. You know the old scout camp at the top of the hill? No? You can see the shadows of the bunkhouse as a Camp Ridgeline from down here. You gotta have the right sunlight, but they're still up there. Some of the kids we get here see the old camp and wonder why we built another camp so close by. And if you hear this story, you'll instead wonder why we didn't just burn Camp Ridgeline to the ground. It started in the 60s. They'd hold a summer camp up there every week after school let out. Sunday evenings, a fresh set of a couple dozen kids would get dropped off and climb up that hill. The counselors would wait at the summit to welcome the new entrance. The uphill climb was supposed to be the first challenge of the week. Usually the group climbing uphill would pass the last week's cohort coming down the mountain to go back home. But one Sunday, in June of 1977, the kids going up the hill didn't pass anyone coming down. Naturally, the parents waiting for their kids in the parking lot at the base of the hill grew impatient, then worried, then panicked. As the sun started setting, relief washed over the crowd when they saw a crowd of kids running downhill toward them. But as they drew nearer, the parents realized it wasn't their own children. Rather, it was the cohort who had just been dropped off. Wet blood covered the hands of each of the kids, but there wasn't a scratch on any of them. They all told tales of what they had seen and done at Camp Ridgeline, and not a single story corroborated any other. One said he tried to administer CPR to a brutalized, incapacitated counselor. Another said they had found a half-dozen counselors crucified on trees and tried to free their wrists and ankles to no avail. Yet another said the other campers from the previous week ambushed them and forced them to dip their hands into the neck of a decapitated deer. Only one thing remained consistent. Something fucked up had happened at Camp Ridgeline. After a parent drove to a nearby gas station and phoned the police, a group of three police officers trudged uphill to see what had happened. The other parents, understandably terrified about the fate of their children, had beat them to the summit. But by the time the police arrived, they too had vanished. What the police found never made it into any of their reports. Each officer agreed that whatever happened up there wasn't for the public to know. Too destabilizing, they said. As luck, or unluck, would have it, my dad was one of those officers. What he experienced was indeed very destabilizing. Unlike the kids who first discovered the horrific scene, the officers were able to form a consensus on what they witnessed. At least, that's what my dad claimed. The other two investigating officers took their own lives shortly after the incident. Dad took great pains to commit the event to paper. Every year I bring a copy of his account with me to camp. I feel like it's important to share his story. So here it is. It was nightfall by the time we arrived at Camp Ridgeline. Officers McMahon, Vincenti and I had our pistols holstered but we were all on edge. The doors to bunk houses were all open and the place was dead quiet. Whatever the kids had stored in the bunk houses was strewn all over the grass. Sleeping bags, backpacks, clothes. The mess of belongings did seem to cluster in a direction away from the lodging and into the trees. We decided to investigate the immediate surroundings first. We didn't take long to find the counselors. All six of them, college kids probably, were dead and sitting in the mud with their hands bound behind them with scraps of rope. From the outside, there wasn't anything obviously wrong with them. Autopsies revealed excessive trauma to all of their internal organs except for their hearts. The reason their hearts had no trauma was that every one of those counselors had their hearts missing. Later that night, we called in a search party and combed the woods. We came up empty handed after three days of searching. Outside the grassy clearing at Camp Ridgeline, it was like those campers never existed. No one ever found a trace of those kids. I wish my dad had lived long enough to find out what happened next. Sometime in the mid-90s, words started to spread around town that one of the campers had been found. She had been living a few thousand miles away in Oregon. Her retired teacher from our town was on a hiking trip in the Cascades and got the gnawing suspicion she recognized her waitress, a woman in her mid-30s. Just as she was paying her bill, she realized that the waitress was a former student, and more importantly, one of the campers who had disappeared from Camp Ridgeline. The teacher broached the topic with the woman gently at first, but after her line of question was brushed off, the teacher grew increasingly convinced she had the right person and refused to be dismissed. Her waitress grew hostile and attacked her with a butter knife from a nearby table before fleeing the restaurant. Shortly thereafter, police caught up to her on her way out of town and brought her in for questioning. At first, their detainee was cooperative, but as police began searching her purse, she became rabid. At least rabid is the word you find in the police reports. She bit the form of a nearby officer and lunged for her belongings, hands still cuffed behind her back. After she was subdued and transferred to a cell, police continued their search. Forensics were quick to the scene. Inside her purse was a perfectly preserved human heart. Questioning the woman went nowhere. Rambling about passing the prize to the other campers, the woman wept uncontrollably when police revealed they had found the heart. Fearing the danger she posed to herself and others, the state transferred her to a psychiatric hospital. Reports differ on the details, but within 48 hours the woman was pronounced deceased. Some workers at the hospital reported an elderly woman being wheeled from her room on a gurney. None of the public records report any cause of death, and the state refused an autopsy. The deceased woman's purse remained in evidence, but the officer in charge of disposing of her belongings found the heart was missing. On the evidence log, the name of another missing child from Camp Ridgeline was signed in on the day of the woman's arrest. No cameras or witnesses saw any outside parties attempt to access the evidence room. To this day, none of the other campers have been found. Of course, we like to tell that story to campers here. Some folks in town like to embellish stories about seeing the missing campers prowling the woods, still youthful, seemingly feral. I don't buy any of those stories, and you shouldn't either. Scarier thought is that those murderous kids are all grown up now, living and working among this, carrying around their prizes, and just hoping they aren't found out.
Speaker 4:
[54:25] Jon, could you have picked a more messed up place to build a summer camp?
Speaker 10:
[54:30] Don't give him any ideas.
Speaker 2:
[54:34] These are just ghost stories. Every camp has ghost stories. At least the good ones.
Speaker 5:
[54:41] Most camp stories don't involve dismemberment.
Speaker 11:
[54:45] Well, the good ones do.
Speaker 2:
[54:47] I'm gonna side with Owen on that one. Never a good sign. Anyone got their tranq gun on hand just in case? Okay, okay. I get the message. I'm gonna head off to bed. We can talk more about what's real and what's not real in the morning.
Speaker 1:
[55:03] Ah, dang! I was kinda hoping someone else would get tranq'd for a change.
Speaker 8:
[55:17] This is gonna sound weird, but did I just see Jon walking away from the campfire?
Speaker 4:
[55:23] Yeah, why?
Speaker 8:
[55:25] Because I was just talking with him over in the mess hall, on the other side of camp.
Speaker 3:
[55:33] For more information on this podcast, including how to submit your own story for consideration, please visit creepypod.com. You can also follow us, at CreepyPod, on social media and YouTube. All stories told on this podcast are done so through Creative Commons share-a-like licensing, or with written consent from the authors. No portion of this podcast may be re-broadcast or otherwise distributed without the express written consent of the Creepy Podcast production team and the stories authored.
Speaker 11:
[56:22] Imagine a city unlike any other, simmering 300 years in a raucous gumbo of debauchery vs. devotion. Catholicism. Confession is anonymous. Vs. Voodoo.
Speaker 6:
[56:35] I think I done made a deal with the devil.
Speaker 11:
[56:39] What you call life.
Speaker 12:
[56:42] And what I called death.
Speaker 11:
[56:45] It's a mysterious crossroads where the denizens of this world. And others.
Speaker 10:
[56:50] He is a trickster. And I'm sure whatever he brought back from the world of the dead was a one-way trip.
Speaker 11:
[56:57] Collide Daily. And for Detective Frank Dupree.
Speaker 12:
[57:01] I will see you in there.
Speaker 11:
[57:03] And Nicky Goodluck. This will be a dark ride. Welcome to New Orleans, Babies.
Speaker 12:
[57:13] Listen to Something Wicked on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy listening.