transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:35] Because that crack inevitably begins to expand until you're no longer looking through it, or even at it. You are in it. And the place you started, the world you knew, it's so small that the idea you'd ever be able to get back to it. Well, I don't need to say anymore. So what is this place? It depends who you are. But one thing is the same for everyone. Peeking behind the curtain of forbidden knowledge in this way, it shatters your sense of yourself, of reality. And that is a very dark place to be. I invite you to be a tourist and step into the minds of those people lost to the unknown and the scarce few who found a way out, to hear their terrifying stories. But I must warn you, once you climb inside, I can't promise that you won't end up counting yourself among them. What they have to say will change you. Bring near what should be kept far, far away. We're not meant to know an anthology of horror, now transmitting from Spectrevision Radio.

Speaker 2:
[02:06] K-Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Speaker 3:
[02:14] It's not a battle.

Speaker 4:
[02:16] So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 5:
[02:20] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 2:
[02:21] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 1:
[02:23] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 4:
[02:25] No, really, stop.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 4:
[02:34] I participate in McDonald's while supplies last. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola in Original and Cherry Vanilla. That Pepsi tastes you low with no artificial sweeteners and three grams of prebiotic fiber. Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Unbelievably Pepsi.

Speaker 5:
[02:55] SpectreVision Radio. Many of the stories you've heard in this series trace their roots to what I heard on what I've come to refer to simply as The Source Recordings. I'm obliged to keep their origins and their location confidential. I listened to them and I chose to adapt them because nuancing relatable pros from these felt safer somehow. Having heard all the Source Recordings and even handled them, I still can't totally vouch for their authenticity. And so for the time being, they have to remain for me in the category of fiction.

Speaker 6:
[04:18] Just before my sister died, she and I went to Russia. Just sightseeing mostly, looking a little into the family tree. We were sitting in Red Square one day, a thousand tourists all over the place. And I spotted these people a ways off, sort of staring at us. This family, four people, man, woman, two little kids. A little boy was in a wheelchair. And they were all staring at us, really intensely. I nudged Tabby and I said, what's up with these people? But she didn't see them, even when I pointed right at them. Over and over, I was like, right there. Follow my finger. There. It got creepy because she just could not see them, no matter what. And I got worried she was having a medical spell of some kind. She was so weak then. I dropped it. When I looked up again, the people were gone. And a couple of months later, I was in a movie theater with a friend of mine. And the lights came up and I saw those same people over near the emergency exit, near the screen, off to the side of it. I was just baffled. They were in the same position. I mean, their bodies were all situated the same exact way as back in Red Square. You had the man and woman beside each other, and then the kids in front of them. And they weren't taking their eyes off me. And I got so scared, I basically leapt out of my seat and pointed. And my friend reached up to grab my arm, and I remember just in shrugging him off, I took my eyes off the people for a split second, and then they were gone. Just winked out of existence. And you know, I realized I had something very wrong with me. Something pretty scary maybe. So, after that, there they were in Patterson Park one day. Much farther away, but still just the same. They were there for maybe ten seconds, not nearly enough time for me to get anywhere close. And then, gone. I told my best friend from AA about it, and she gave me this smart advice, which was to see a doctor, get scanned. But she also had a theory that maybe it was psychological. I'd been on a wagon for only about six months. It was a rough adjustment. So, Tabby died in August of that year. And the funeral was my breaking point. I was at a really low, low ebb. All kinds of negative thoughts, negative emotions. After everyone left the grave, I walked around. It was snowing. I just wanted to be like in the dark and enclosed. And I went into a mausoleum, real small. It was a memorial to veterans and inside, it had these electric candles going. And when I turned around and looked out through the entrance, the family was there again, way off near some graves. And I actually started yelling at them. I don't know what. They were a little closer than they'd ever been. So I got a real good look. It was like, if I didn't make any kind of aggressive move, they'd linger a bit. They had real plain dark clothes. So they looked to me almost like Mennonites maybe, or Amish people. And that was the first time I noticed that the wheelchair the little boy was sitting in was so old, I didn't even recognize the materials. It was maybe all iron or wood. So there was the sense that these people weren't even of the modern day. And yeah, this time I actually saw them vanish. It was like some dumb thing from movies. Kind of a jump cut. They were there one second and gone the next. And it was all just... cemetery where they used to be. After that, they were just part of my life. I'd see them every nine or ten days, maybe. All during the time I was getting checked out for the possible things that can go wrong with your brain. Just setting aside the depression. It was totally breaking my money situation. Paying for all this stuff, all these tests that showed nothing. The bookstore wasn't doing well at all. And now I was trying really weird stuff when I saw the family, these experiments. Like I'd charge at them. That did no good. It made them vanish. Or I'd take a picture, but they wouldn't show up in it. I was ready to accept that I was schizophrenic or, you know, whatever went hand in hand with something like that. Time for psychiatric help, absolutely. So, around that point, some lawyer called me, said that the family cabin up in Pennsylvania was now technically mine with Tabby being gone. I needed to sell it to keep the bookstore going, but I decided to go up there one more time first, all alone. It was a little ways up in the mountains, up near Tartown. Nostalgia messed my judgment up pretty bad. Tabby and I spent a lot of summers in that cabin, so I felt like I absolutely had to spend a couple days up there, for her, you know. And my AA friend, Trevor, warned me. She said, do not go off anywhere alone now without letting me know exactly where you are all the time. I drove up there and my psychology at that point was just didn't care much what happened to me. I thought, yeah, whatever happens, just let it happen. So what if I start drinking up there or I see that weird family again? What difference does it make? What difference does it make if they find out I need brain surgery? Very dangerous thoughts I was having. The cabin was pretty primitive, no TV. My parents were hippies. I was okay till dark. And then it got quiet in a kind of a scary way. Because winter up there was a different animal. You felt the woods much differently. I was in the main room and I went into the kitchen. And there they were. The people. And this wasn't them in a tableau, I guess is the word, far away from me. They were sitting at the kitchen table looking at me. I mean right there. I had so completely absorbed them into my life at that point in a sick way that I just stood there and took them in. I was getting all these details I never had before. You know, their hair and the dress on the little girl and the boy and how his spine was crooked and he wasn't sitting in the wheelchair quite straight. And it was like we'd all become weirdly OK with each other. Like they knew I wasn't going to be aggressive anymore and I was sure they wouldn't hurt me. So I walked up to the woman sitting there and I I real slowly put my hand on her shoulder. I thought her husband might do something but he just watched. And yeah, it was just like feeling a normal person. But after one second I had the sense that I'd really trespassed. Like this was something I was absolutely not supposed to do. I crossed a line so I moved back. I hit the light switch on and of course what happened? They vanished. After that it was twice a week they appeared and I just kept living in the cabin. I didn't want to go back to my life. My life was overwhelming. I wanted to stay. I'll tell you what it was like. It was like when you go some place where they're reenacting pioneer days in a fake settlement and you don't really want to talk to the actors and they don't really want to talk to you so you coexist without talking. That's what the family was like when they appeared. Sometimes I'd see the kids sitting in this bare bedroom like they'd just finished playing. I'd see the man and wife standing outside looking at the trees. Just these living pictures of a family. Once I walked into my bedroom and the boy's wheelchair was in there, but he wasn't. I gave it a really good going over, rolled it back and forth a little. It was incredibly heavy, this old thing. And of course, when I took a picture, the wheelchair wasn't there. The strangest one was, I went into the cellar, this totally dank, unfinished space, and the husband was sitting down there at the table my father used to sit at. And he had his head in his hands, like this, concentrating. And he looked at me, and then forgot about me just as quick. I thought I knew by then these people weren't in our family tree anywhere, but you know, it gets foggy the further you go back. It gets more and more uncertain. I should say, there was another strange moment. One time they were all in the kitchen, and the husband was holding the little girl's hand, which was a first, and the wife, her eyes were closed, and she was holding something in her left hand under the table, something with a little circular top, like a tiny bottle. I tried to bend down to see more, but they all vanished when I did. So what I told Trevor, because she insisted on coming all the way up to the cabin to see me, was that my feeling was that these people were content somehow to be there with me. And I'd leave at some point and see if they, you know, if they followed me. But yeah, you know, I can say definitively, the thought of that was what kept me there, too. I was afraid to find out that they'd follow me. That would mean I'd never be rid of them. And if that was true, I didn't know if I could face that. As long as I stayed in the cabin, it felt like life had been put on pause. Safer that way. It was safer to stay in the pause. I can go back to Baltimore. The doctors are going to say, I'm really sick, either physically or mentally. But they couldn't get at me in the cabin. So Trevor left. That night, I was listening to the weather report, and I heard the kitchen door open. And I went in there, and I saw the family outside in the back. It was maybe 10 degrees, but I went out. They were standing near where the woods began, but the little boy wasn't there. There was a bunch of disturbed dirt where they were, like a grave. And their heads were bowed, like they were at a funeral. I thought, oh my god, there's something playing out here. The whole week went by, nothing. No sign of the family. I thought, are they gone? Is that the end? Then one night, I look out my window, and the man and woman are out there alone, in the same place as before. And now you could see the outline of another grave. And she was kneeling and praying there. And I knew right away, this was their little girl's grave. Both kids gone now. And the man had his hand on the wife's shoulder, but then he just turned and left her there. Then I made myself look away, very intentionally. And then look back again. I figured it will be the same way it always is. They will be gone, right? There won't even be any trace of the graves, like a movie that ends all of a sudden. But the woman was standing there, and looking at me through the window, very directly. And I moved away real slow. The way she was looking at me, that was... I knew it was time to go. Let's just say that. My fear mechanism, it wasn't going to appease me anymore. No more appeasement. It was saying, go now. So I started packing up. So now it's dark, and I'm on my way out. I go through the living room, and the man, the husband, he's slumped down in my chair, and his eyes are real glassy. He's staring, but his eyes are fixed. And... It was like his face was in two parts suddenly. Everything above his nose was like dark gray. And everything below was dark red. Like some kind of blood burst, or something had some medical attack. I don't know. He was holding a stone cup in one hand. I didn't even... You know, suddenly it was like when you're in a fun house at Halloween, and you see some display that's kind of hideous. And you keep moving. You don't even let it register. All I had left was to get my phone from my bedroom and my pills from the bathroom. I went right past him. And I'm moving very fast because this is all escalating faster and faster. The little cabinet above the sink was open. And now suddenly there was this brown bottle on the shelf next to my pills. Real small with a cork in it. This old, old label that was just barely still on there. And it had a snake head drawn on it. And the word Merck, M-U-R-K, with the two dots over the U, the... I'll never remember the term for that. I grab my pills and head out. And the woman is standing in the corner of the bedroom. And her eyes are wet like she's been crying. And she opens her mouth and she says, Now, we can be together. In English, very broken, so I can understand her, but the accent is obviously Russian or Estonian. And I really do not remember how I got past her. I've blanked it out. She was very close to the doorway, so I would have had to go right by, so I must have. That would have been the only way out, but that one small part of the scene has never come back. So it could be maybe that something bad happened, like maybe she reached out to touch me or something, and I can't deal with that, so I've wiped it out. The next thing I do remember, I was in the car driving back, and I was so shaken up, I forgot to put my headlights on. People were signaling me, and I finally understood. That was it. I never saw them again. But it was a lot of years with me having dreams about the way I thought she might have ended, which was taking the rest of the poison in that bottle, because I seem to remember there had been a little bit left in there when I picked it up, and that I could deal with. But what I still can't deal with, thinking about, and I would dream about this a lot, thinking how long she might have stayed there all alone in the cabin after I left, before she actually did it. I tortured myself, imagining her all alone up there, and wandering from room to room, thinking about what she did to her family, even if they were never really there, only ghosts, what she did to them. The cabin is gone now. I tore it down, so at least I know she's not there anymore. But where did she come from, and where did she go? Where did they all go?

Speaker 7:
[23:50] My goal is to tell the story one more time, and then never again. It's been five years since the last time, but it just takes it all out of me. So, no more, hopefully. It was summer break was coming up, and I was not in a great headspace at all. And in the student union, someone had posted a notice. Come walk the Strongbone Road. So I called, and this guy, Peter, answered, and yeah. He was getting random people together to hike all hundred miles. A hundred and thirty, actually, of the road. As a, like a meditation thing. He wanted to do it as a silent hike. Very zen. I'd never done a hike of more than fifty, but I thought I could do it. It was, it was just a strange, different thing to try. So I signed up. And it wasn't even technically legal, because the road was closed off. It's, it's up in Alberta. The only reason it was ever built was for trucks to haul chemicals, petrochemicals, out of a couple factories out there. It didn't have other traffic. It was a private road. So five days of silent walking it was going to be. My friends thought I was crazy. We had to pack all our food in advance, and the water was in these emergency pumps on the side of the road every 15 miles or so. So there was me, there was this guy Peter, and then two other people. There was Shannon, who was very cool. She was this real athletic woman, very positive, smart, very new age. But then there was Emma. Emma was about 20, and she just gave off a strange, unfriendly vibe. Seemed nervous at all times. We were all at the motel the night before we got our ride out to St. John, and I woke up in the morning, and she was out on the sidewalk near my room, having some big confrontation with some other guest. He was yelling at her that she'd call the cops on her if she didn't leave him alone. I never got the story, but I thought, OK, this guy Peter's a little quiet and weird, but am I? She could be a real problem. I had my chance to back out right then, but I felt too committed. This was something I wanted to do. I wanted this experience. We got dropped off at the start of the road. It was barely even a road. It was just this white asphalt. No lines, no signs, almost no bends even. Flat, just perfectly flat. And it's like you're going through a desert. There's nothing to look at. It's just a flat plate. They stopped using it for trucks back in the mid-90s. You know, you can look at all the pictures you want, but you can't feel the remoteness of the place in your bones till you stand there. That sort of grayness it had about it, emptiness, no color. Pictures don't really tell you about it. So, I'm waiting for Peter to give us a little pep talk after our ride heads back, but nope. He just picks up his pack and off we go. Day one. No phones, no music, no talking. We were supposed to take it real slow and save any talking till the camp at night, which was right on the road. And Peter said he had a satellite phone just in case of some worst-case scenario, but really, as you walked, you couldn't go anywhere except your own imagination, your own problems. Because visually, you had nothing to distract you. The road just went and went, and every direction you looked was the same. You couldn't even use the mountains as a reference point because they were too far away. I worried a little bit about coyotes, and I was praying my back would hold up. The other creepy thing about it all was the Yanni plant. In the summer seasons, Yanni could give you some intense hallucinations if you chewed it. And it was poking up through the cracks in the road and along the sides, kind of like, kind of like daring you to have some. It had a reputation of giving such bad trips. It didn't have much value to the druggies. It just, it looked like black ivy. I had no interest in it, but I didn't like the way it looked. So yeah, no real contact during the day between us. We sort of separated as we went, just barely kept each other in sight. Sometimes we'd pass and nod. Sometimes Peter would get way far ahead. That first night, all I could see of anyone was just a little glow, which I guess was his tent far away. Emma didn't even bring one. She just crashed in a sleeping bag on the side of the road, and it was odd because no one really seemed to want to talk. We kept in our own spaces after maybe 10 words of catching up. We just retreated it into our shelves. The next morning, I was already thinking I had made a mistake. We walked, and I'd go two, three hours without seeing Shannon or Emma, and Peter was just gone all day, somewhere way up ahead. I couldn't settle my mind. There was just no peaceful aspect to the walking at all. It was just mental novocaine. By the middle of the day, I just wanted to sleep again, so I crawled into my tent. I woke up a little before dusk. It was raining a little, and I saw a shadow above my tent. It was real close, like right outside the tent, and as soon as I sat up, it moved away fast, and I heard footsteps. And when I did look out, I mean, there was no one out there. I did see Shannon again at one point before I started trying to walk through the night. She smiled at me, like, yeah, I'm okay. I figured if I walked through the night, I'd at least never let Peter get so far ahead that I felt nervous about it. It got dark. I went off the road about five times somehow, even though it was perfectly straight. It was just so dark. And I thought, where are the sounds of the animals? Where's the wind? And if I stepped on a yanny by accident, I would think, oh, God, it touched me. It touched me. I knew it was there, but I couldn't see it. That was the worst. So, so yeah, maybe I had begun to break down mentally already, just two days in. We had another night where we all were so spread out, everyone was just basically on their own, totally isolated. Then the next morning, Emma started talking to me. I forget if she came from ahead or behind, but once she started talking, she just wouldn't stop. It was this monologue that went on and on and on all about her life, her paranoia. And it probably wasn't even half of what they found out about her later, all the stuff about the restraining orders and the homelessness and the faking being a student at college. I remember her telling me the whole story of how she was abducted once by some kind of alien presence. I remember her talking about the carnival she went to and out of the shadows came something. And she was in support group after support group to deal with it because she thought she'd lost entire weeks after she was taken by that uh, that uh, um, force. I mean, you can't imagine someone talking that much all about God knows what. It was um, aliens are living in the woods and they look like tree stumps, but no one can see them except her. It was, there are people she knows who glimpsed Satan in the sky and had their minds destroyed and they're living in asylums in Greece. I got away from her finally. She was poisoned. I realized at some point that I hadn't been able to identify two things on the landscape which were different from hour to hour, and I couldn't identify two conscious thoughts I had. I literally did not remember what I'd even been thinking about five minutes before. If you asked me as I lay there in my tent how long it felt like I walked that day, I would have said, well, frankly, maybe five miles or maybe 500. I didn't know. It was a total blur. My feet were going numb, and they always say when they talk about what happened, well, if you have inexperienced people on very low rations, and they're getting weaker every day, and in a place none of them knows, with no real sense of progress, no talk, and then maybe if a yanny gets ingested in the warm weather, then it could have accounted for what happened next. But the toxicology didn't show it, so that proves it for me. We were clean. I think it was the place, and with Peter, you know, the story with him tells itself. Come to find out after it all happened that when he was, like, eleven, a friend of his disappeared. His family invited the kid to go camping with them, and in the middle of the night, for some reason, he got up and wandered down the trail, and at some point he fell into a gorge and died. And Peter saw him leave his tent, so apparently he carried this awful guilt with him all his life. Just nested. Then when he was grown up, he led these hiking meetups, and one day he went, and they never knew if this was by accident or on purpose, but he took a group really close to where the kid had fallen and died, and maybe that turned something really dark in him that wasn't even quite there before, because oh god, he started like dying his hair and wearing weird clothes, and supposedly his signature even changed somehow, and there's a photo of him in the same exact kind of t-shirt that his friend wore the night he died. Same logo on it, same everything. That's the t-shirt he had out on Strongbone Road. The thinking was, on some level, he was trying to be that kid, the kid who fell into the gorge. And apparently Peter's walks got longer and longer and more isolated, and then here comes the notice on the bulletin board, the one I saw. I can't remember exactly when the last time I saw him out there was, whether it was day 2, day 3. I mean, my mind was getting to be like... Like, okay, I think of it as an old TV screen that's just showing a pattern of stripes sort of blipping up and down. Shannon was at a loss, too, about where Peter was when I passed her. Neither of us wanted to talk to Emma. We weren't going near her. He just... Who knows? I'd walk until the pain in my feet got real bad. Then I'd lie down on the road and think, if I just lie here and close my eyes, maybe, maybe the landscape will change. But it was the exact same. Always. I was really weak, but I didn't have any appetite. I rested near one of the water pumps, and when it was all over, that was where they found my tent. I pitched it then on day four, and I kept walking and never took my tent with me. Left some food behind even, so that tells you where I was at mentally. Time didn't even mean much at that point, but I started to imagine that the plane wasn't even a plane. It just became two white skies, one on top and one below, divided by a black line that would fade in and out like... Sometimes I'd see the road, and sometimes I'd see that. And I started imagining the yanni plants were stretching and getting longer. Then around dusk, I think, I saw something up ahead and I thought, why are big lobsters fighting in the road? I mean, look how big they are. But, it was Emma and Shannon? They were literally fighting in the road. Shannon rolled on top of Emma, and they were scratching and clawing at each other. And I got in there and broke it up, and Shannon ran off. She was crying. She was holding her shoulder. I don't know where Emma ran to. And the diary Shannon kept didn't say anything about the fight. I know, but I saw it. She wasn't making any sense towards the end anyway. I read the whole thing online. They printed it. Anyway, and at one point, past dark, I thought I saw Peter, but he was sort of wispy and ghostly. He was coming back from the other direction, from up ahead. And I tried to grab him and say, we have to all get back together or we're going to die out here. There's no end to this road we were all lied to. But he looked right through me and he kept going, kept going down the road and I was too weak to follow him. I really doubt he was real. The last day, they say I only covered 11 miles. I saw this woman on the road way up ahead, waiting for me. She was wearing all black. Not, not a dress, but you know the kind of clothes that someone who works at a kitchen wears. I knew, I knew that she was a baker. I couldn't say why. She never said anything. She wasn't holding anything. But I knew, I knew this is what she was. I know she wanted me to keep going. She was going to give me something if I walked far enough. But I didn't know what. I was going to have to look for it, though. It was going to be in a cool, dark place, which I wanted so badly to hear at that point because it had gotten so hot. All I could think of was this cool, dark place. I was happy again. I had a reason to care. I had a reason to keep walking. And, if you read Shannon's diary, there's a baker, too. Even calls her a baker, says she promised her something good to eat. There's just no other, absolutely no other description or context. I must have had a little bit of sanity left in me because when I saw the crack, I think I knew what it was on some level, right away. It went all the way across the road and beyond it to the right. I mean, absolutely a hundred feet wide. I just stopped where I was. I was in awe. That's how big it was. Sinkhole. I started walking to it. I didn't care how deadly it looked. I wanted to go where the baker wanted to send me. I was going to get something nice, but I had to go down into it. So there was this sheer drop about, probably about 15 feet down into the dark. But you could ease yourself down on the right ridges, these shelves. I sat down on the edge of the asphalt, and I lowered myself down until I found some footing. Scooted down, and then I let go. Just dropped, hit the ground really hard. I saw someone, and I just didn't recognize her at first. She was on her back, and her legs were up, and kinda hooked over a big rock of asphalt. Her eyes were open, and there was a lot of blood under her nose. Finally, I understood that it was Shannon. I crawled over to her, and... Her eyes kinda looked fake. I remember, like, someone put marbles there, but not real eyes. I felt, um, nothing, really. It was almost like a piece of trivia. Didn't affect me. I crawled off into the dark because it was nice and cool. I crawled underneath this long section of asphalt, and it looked like there was a second drop, and the angle was even bigger. And suddenly this face sort of looms up at me in the dark, very white face. It was right near my hand. It was Emma. She was flat on her stomach. She was like some ghost that had popped out at me, and she just slid down, right out of sight, down deep, not a sound. And gone. She was gone. And I was all alone. There's a book called Lord of the Flies, and it had this ending where the police or whoever shows up and it snaps everyone in one second back to reality after a completely insane situation. It felt like that. When they were putting me into the ambulance, I felt like myself again, even through all the pain. And they tell me I had tears just like pouring down my face. And I was asking where Peter was. Where's Peter? Where's Peter? I'd crawled out of the sinkhole and walked all the way almost to the end of the road under my own power somehow. A surveyor spotted me, someone from Musqua. They found Peter's backpack, but they didn't find him. They thought he might have walked into the mountains, or maybe he got picked up on one of the highways you could get to on foot if you knew exactly where to walk. And had the stamina, but I'm like most people. I just do not get where he could have gone. He would have eventually come across either the highway or a water source, and that's your survival right there. So maybe he walked right past those, and then, I mean, there's no logical answer. I wish I was 100% sure they really searched every inch of that hole because it was, God, it was so big. Lots of layers. Shannon and Emma both died. Both of them fell into it differently. But I'll always think there was something out there waiting for us or waiting for people like us. Even Shannon was very troubled, turned out. Her son was very disturbed. He'd gotten violent. She was alone. And she was getting over a breakdown and needed something like that walk. Settle her life some, clear her head. I think you could stand out there on that road, day in and day out, and it would never show itself again, whatever it was out there. Some truck driver came and said he saw the baker too when he was on a haul once, but like ten years before on the road. He said, um, she had a little stand set up far away, selling something absolutely in the middle of nowhere, on Strongbone Road of all places. So when he saw that, he floored it because he got a terrible feeling from seeing her. Thought he might die if he even stopped. His description was the same as mine, but who knows if he, um, you know, who knows if it's true.

Speaker 8:
[47:28] All I ever knew about my grandmother was that my father ran away from home when he was 15, and he almost never had any real contact with her after that. Growing up, I got a birthday card in the mail from her every few years, but I never saw her. Not even once. One day, when I was about 10, I guess, I asked one too many questions, and my mother sat me down, said that my grandma was a good person, but she had a certain kind of compulsion, and dad thought it wasn't healthy to be around someone like that. Apparently, she had almost died a couple of times because of it. That was it. That was all the info I got. I was just left wondering all my life, you know, you're a kid, you've got other stuff on your mind. I was afraid to ask my dad about it, but back in 1992, my fiance pointed out an article in the paper talking about someone named Audrey Verden. Well, she had just gotten arrested for breaking and entering and theft at the Fullerton campus that was near me. She said, that can't be your grandmother, can it? And I said, no, because I had always been told, you know, she moved to Canada with her second or third husband, whichever it was. I don't remember. When I wound up looking into it, I did some research and a couple of weeks later, there I am in Orange County Circuit Court to see her being sentenced. You know, I couldn't stay away. I was an adult now and the curiosity factor was too much. I didn't tell anyone when I was going. Audrey was only 58 then. She had my father when she was just a teenager. But she looked really bad, really pale, small and yeah, she looked like a hell of a lot like my father. And what she done was she and someone else had broken into a Kim lab on campus and looted a medical refrigerator and stolen blood. It was supposed to be going towards some sort of study. It was children's blood, actually, which made it a lot. Well it made it all the more freaky. So I'm listening to this information anonymously. And then she was free to go. She'd be serving a couple of months, sometime down the road. I followed her out to the parking lot, but I never went up to her because I just, I didn't feel right about it. My mother kind of came clean when I finally told her about this. It turned out Audrey had pretty much always lived in the area. And I remembered then that when they gave me those birthday cards when I was a kid, the envelopes had already been removed. Anyway, when she was in her teens, she had apparently developed something called hemotomania, which was a craving to drink blood and get the psychological reward, is maybe the word, when it gives those people, right? Like some people believe they get younger when they drink it, that kind of thing. It's like a life essence belief. Turns out a person's body can more or less deal with it sometimes without getting horribly sick. But you never know. Drinking human blood can mess you up pretty badly. So, it's not even remotely healthy. And only a few weeks after Audrey got married, her husband had tried to have her committed for it. She was pregnant with dad back then. She did the best she could after that. Single mother from the time she was 17. That's the thing my mother made pretty clear. Dad had never really hated her. He never called her a bad parent. And he knew that she'd never actually physically hurt anyone to feed her compulsion. It wasn't about that. But dad was a hard man. He wasn't a forgiver and he didn't like weakness. So Audrey got kind of my life forever. When dad was only about 12, her brother, his uncle died in a really terrible, bloody boating accident. She was right there in the boat when it happened. And after that, she got, she got far worse. Dad told mom once about some time, just before he ran away, when Audrey didn't even get out of bed for a long time. And one day dad remembered looking in on her and seeing blood smeared all over her mouth. And he ran away from home that same night. And he never really went back. Mom made me swear I never told dad about what she told me. He'd flip. But a few days later, he sent me a note in the mail, had a picture with it. He just wanted me to look at a photo before I considered bringing Audrey into my life at all. It was this old black and white picture from the 50s. It was taken at a party. All those people dressed up. It was very Bohemian-like, and Audrey was in there, and people were drinking something from champagne flutes, something really dark. It was a really dark liquid, and everyone had sort of a thumbprint, it looked like, on their foreheads. And there was an old caption beneath the photo. It said, Sanguinarians and Donors Party, July 24th, 1954. What my folks didn't know, not even my fiance knew this, was that I had a kind of compulsion myself, which worried me. It was very different from Audrey's, nothing violent or dark, but still really troubling. I felt it for years, so I couldn't really get her out of my head. So I tracked down her address, and one day, I went out there. It was on the county line. She didn't have a phone number, so I just showed up. Middle of the day, I took a chance. It was this gravel road that went way back into the woods, full of potholes, and then it opened up a little, and there was this very big trailer there. And besides the trailer was an old ice cream truck done up in all these bright colors. But it was rusting out, so a really remote place. I went up and knocked on the door, and here she came. I introduced myself, and she seemed a little dazed and out of it, not overly warm to me, but she was definitely OK with seeing me, I thought. I went in, and we sat there and talked. The place was, I mean, to call it a mess would be really positive. It was dark. It just, this life she was leading, it was obviously hard, but she was, anyway, she asked about my life, and in general, she was positive, and neither one of us brought out my father or my mother, so I felt really awkward, but I thought I could get through it. Even though I'm sitting there, and I really want so bad to know about what brought her to the state, and what her mind is like, because sometimes I was getting scared for myself, and what mine was like, sometimes. At some point, it felt like I had to get out of there. I didn't want to make any promises about keeping up any kind of relationship, and it got hard to stay away from certain topics. So you're doing that thing where you're looking for a convenient gap to say, okay, gotta go. Then I heard a door open, and someone comes in from the other room. This guy walks in. I don't know how to describe him. First, maybe the skinniest man I've ever seen. He's wearing at least two sweaters on this 98 degree day, and there's no AC in the trailer that I'm aware of. He has these big staring eyes, bare feet, looked real surprised Audrey had a visitor, and he had something about him that I tried not to stare at. The skin on his neck was real rough, sort of sandpapery, and it looked like half of it was just not there. Like it was just this not all the way formed post, instead of a real neck. Obviously, something had happened to him. He walks right past me, doesn't say hello, and Audrey pats the sofa. She says, come, sit, Jody. And she tells me this is her boyfriend. Turns out he was 28 when this happened. He looked really out of it, doesn't smile, doesn't say anything until I ask him what he does. And he mutters something about walking dogs, at which point Audrey says, Oh, yes, he was attacked by one. See and his stare. His stare on me was completely nerve wracking. So I finally get out of there. I was, I mean, he was just oozing bad vibes. I was really nervous. There was nothing normal about this guy. And he clearly did not want me there. I remember saying to myself, Well, you'll never see her again. You'll be gone in three minutes. And only because Audrey had specifically told me that the ice cream truck couldn't run, I took notice of this faint humming sound around it. I hadn't been paying much attention on my first pass, and I saw that there was a cable running through the grass to it. Like some kind of appliance inside the truck had been getting power from the trailer all this time. I get in my car, and I start going back down the gravel road. Real slow. I think I said I said there were lots of potholes. Anyway, you know, I'm waiting for the AC to really kick in. This is maybe like two minutes from the time I walked out of the screen door. I look in the rearview mirror, and here comes Jody Burr, running from the trailer towards the car, sprinting. He was holding an axe. I was so shocked, I ran into a rut, and the tire spun, and that was all it took to slow me down enough. He got to the car, and he swung the axe at my window. As he ran, and it blew in, just exploded. Glass all over me. Hits my eyes. It went into my mouth. And the car is rolling forward, and it drops the axe. And his entire head comes through the window, and I feel him trying to lunge at my neck, just with his mouth. I felt his breath. I reached down. I was totally flailing. I felt for the car phone receiver, and out of self-defense, I swung it up, and I hit him as hard as I could. It was right on the forehead. Real sickening thud. I got him just so. And his head flies up, and he goes down right out of sight, out onto the gravel. I did stop. I got out. Because I wanted that axe before he could get to it. But he was completely out, unconscious. His entire face was bloody. He looked dead. I mean, it came out that he was in terrible physical condition. So it took much less to put him out cold than normal. But I was completely repulsed by him. I didn't make the slightest attempt to get close or help him. I started walking back to the trailer with the axe. Tell my grandmother what happened. Call the police. I see some more people through the window now though. There was Audrey, but then two more people. More people who must have come from the bedrooms and they all saw me. And what I think now and what I told the police was that they were waiting to see which one of us, me or Jodie Burr, was going to come back. And when they saw it was me and not him, they knew it was all over. Their lives were done because what was in the ice cream truck was going to get found out. So I watched them reach down to these glasses, like some kind of toast had just been set up and they all drank. And of course, I mean, I assumed it was blood, it was dark. That's all I knew. I yanked on the screen door, but someone had locked it. Then one of the people, she was about as young as Jody was. She pulled something from the pocket of her hoodie and it was clearly a grenade. She pulled the pen and she set it down on the coffee table. I turned and ran, but I could only get so far. It sounded like a big car crash happened behind me. The trailer blew. I remember a sense of being punched by air on my back and my feet coming right off the grass, feeling this intense heat all around me. And I remember being spun like a top in mid air before I came down. And I was lucky to not have boards impale me or bricks knock me out dead. I got away with four broken bones and a concussion. Got away. So I was able to testify about everything. In the ice cream truck, they found a 19-year-old girl in a freezer. And then eventually, or I should say quickly, they went looking for others. They never did find hard proof that Audrey knew about the killings. But it's tough not to surmise the worst. I got a good look through the window. And she seemed real sad to me. Like she was saying to me she was sorry. Just my imagination, maybe. My scars healed up inside of a ear. But I had to tell the story about, about ten times before I finally felt free of it.

Speaker 5:
[65:58] 25% of all proceeds from the Knifepoint Horror Merchandise Shop are donated to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Speaker 4:
[66:06] knifepointhorror.dashary.com Now receiving frequency transmission.

Speaker 3:
[66:21] The best thing about the human species is that we have emotion. There is nothing like the human emotions that we feel in our physical bodies of pain and grief and sorrow and beauty, and we taste chocolate cake. We are able to go through all these human emotions when we keep going. And even though we feel the darkest of dark, the lightest of light, we somehow grow and choose to live another day. Even if we all fall into those really dark times, you know, we are so resilient as a human race, and there is so much good within our hearts.

Speaker 7:
[67:26] Transmission complete.

Speaker 1:
[67:28] Stay tuned to SpectreVision Radio.

Speaker 5:
[67:31] Stay.

Speaker 3:
[67:33] Stay.