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- [00:02]
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Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [00:41]
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This is crime house. A passenger on the afternoon train who's a little too still, too blank. Another passenger who rides to the end of the line every single day and never actually goes anywhere. A conductor who looks right at you and somehow doesn't see you at all. And a door that should never, ever be opened. This is one of the Internet's most quietly terrifying creepypastas, and once you've heard it, you'll never sit on an empty train the same way again. Welcome to Twisted A Crime Palace Original. I'm Heidi Wong. Every week I'll take you deep into humanity's darkest stories and the creepiest corners of the Internet. If you've ever had a haunted moment or a twisted tale of your own, I want to hear about it. Drop it in the comments. The creepier the better. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free. Subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. We're also on YouTube with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life. Today, I'm telling you the story of the strangers. It's a creepypasta whose author has remained anonymous, and that feels weirdly perfect for this one because it's a story about people with no names, no faces that you can hold on to. People who blend into a crowd so completely that you'd never look twice. It's told by someone who decided one day to look twice and regretted it.
- [02:24]
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- [04:54]
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before I get started, this one does get dark. It includes someone slowly unraveling into obsession and some graphic violence, including the killing of innocent people and a few disturbing images along the way. This is one of those creepypastas that doesn't really open up with anything super scary right off the bat. It starts with something almost everybody on earth has done zoning out on a train and people watching to kill time. That's what makes the slow burn so effective. The horror is secretly wrapped up in the ordinary. It starts as the most mundane story that you could imagine. Some guy on a subway, a boring ride home. And it ends somewhere genuinely, vastly different and wrong. A lot of readers say that this one isn't scary in the jump scare sense. It's unsettling. It's the kind of story that doesn't get you while you're reading it. It gets you three days later on your own commute when the car goes quiet. And here's the fair warning. The real horror in the story isn't the monster. It's what the narrator slowly turns into. Our narrator's name is Andrew Ericks. He's 25 years old and he lives in New York City. And he rides the subway to and from a factory job every single day. And the whole thing starts with a decision so small, so ordinary, that it's almost funny. Andrew decides to stop carrying his backpack to work. That's it. That's the inciting incident of one of the most unsettling stories on the Internet. Andrew figures a grown man lugging a book bag around looks immature, like a high schooler. A briefcase feels wrong for a factory job. A messenger bag feels, in his words, a little too pursey. So he stops bringing a bag with him. And that one little choice has a ripple effect. No bag means no books, so he can't read on his half hour commute anymore for a while. His MP3 player picks up the slack until it breaks after he drops it getting off the train. So he gives up on that too. And now Andrew has a problem we've all had at some a half hour commute twice a day, with absolutely nothing to do. So he starts people watching. Now Andrew's a little shy, so he doesn't want to get caught staring. He learns to do it on the sly. And pretty quickly, he realizes something kind of comforting. He's not the only one who feels awkward in public. Everyone's a little uncomfortable on a packed train. They just cover it up in different ways. And because he's got nothing but time, he starts sorting them into categories in his head. There's the fidgeters, the ones who can't get comfortable and are constantly shifting their weight, moving their hands or sliding their feet around. There's the fake sleepers who close their eyes the second they sit down and zone out until their stop, versus the real sleepers who who twitch and jerk awake at every loud noise. The MP3 addicts, the laptop people. The groups that talk way too loud. The phone talkers who are either wildly popular or just physically incapable of being quiet for two minutes. I love this part. It's such a relatable human little hobby. We've all done some version of it. And when something finally cracks that surface, it's extremely unsettling. Just as the people watching is getting boring, Andrew spots what he calls his first incongruity. He sees a middle aged man, brown hair, average height, average weight. He's dressed like it's casual Friday every day, with a plain sweater and Dockers. Nothing remarkable about him at all. And that's exactly the problem. The man is too normal. It's like he was specifically designed to disappear into a crowd. And the reason Andrew even notices him is because he's been studying how people act on the train. And this guy doesn't act at all. He doesn't even react. He just sits there, perfectly still, eyes forward, face completely blank. Andrew describes him like someone watching a documentary about fish. Not bored, not interested, just present, but not really there. Andrew sees him on a Monday and then again on a Thursday. The same train, same car, even the same seat. And the second time Andrew really watches him. The guy is downright unnerving. No matter what happens around him, nothing registers. At one point, a woman gets on with a screaming, wailing child and sits right behind him. And the man doesn't so much as turn his head. And Andrew says, that kid was loud. By the time the train hits his stop, Andrew feels sick to his stomach. His hands are shaking like he's having a nicotine withdrawal. Something about this man is just wrong. Andrew's first instinct is that the guy is some kind of sociopath. One of those eerily calm type who just turns out to have a freezer full of body parts. So Andrew does the sensible thing. He avoids him for a couple of weeks. He stays away from that train. And when he can't, he picks a car as far from the man as he can get. And then one morning, he sees another one. A woman this time, just as plain and out of place in all of the noise and movement around her. The same blank stillness. And the moment Andrew recognizes that she belongs to the same category as the man is the moment that his little hobby stops being a hobby. It becomes a religion. He can't get on the train or the bus anymore without scanning every single face, running a checklist in his head. Plain clothes, solid colors. No brand names. Check. No expression, no glancing out the window, no looking at other passengers. Check. No bag, no purse, no accessories of any kind. Check, check, check. And every time he finds one, he gets the same reaction. Dry throat, sweaty palms, that prick in the back of his neck. He compares it to the feeling of giving a speech in front of a crowd. That sense of being on display. Because even though these people never look at him, he feels exposed around them. Like, how could they not see me? I can see them so clearly. He starts calling them the strangers. He doesn't see them every day, but once he starts looking, he sees them often enough. And eventually his curiosity gets bigger than his fear. He decides to follow one. He picks the original. The two normal man on the afternoon train. The one who always takes the same seat Andrew gets on, sits behind him and just waits to see where the guy goes. They ride all the way to the end of the line. The man stands up and gets off. Andrew follows at a distance, trying to look casual. But the man doesn't go anywhere. He walks a few feet, sits down on a bench and waits, blank as ever. A few minutes later, the next train pulls in. The man gets on and takes the exact same seat. He's not commuting. He's not going home or running errands. He's just riding the subway to the end of the line and riding it back, over and over, for no reason that Andrew can think of. And that's what breaks Andrew's brain. He can't stop thinking about it. Why would anyone do that? Why would this guy ride trains back and forth, going absolutely nowhere? Andrew remembers reading once that human minds recoil from certain things and that the very sight of them feels like an insult. Like big spiders, they just look wrong to us. And that's what the strangers have started to feel like to him. So he follows the man again the next day and the day after that. Every day for a week, the two of them ride together, although only Andrew knows it. So soon he's not stopping at his own stop anymore. He's riding for hours from one end of the city to the other and back, just watching. He's not people watching anymore. He's stranger watching. And he doesn't have eyes for anyone else. And then he loses his job. Andrew isn't focusing. He's not producing. He's barely there. And the wild part is Andrew can barely hear his boss fire him. Because all he can think about is his. His real work now. He leaves the factory at noon that day and he heads straight for the train. And tonight he's going to do the thing that he's too Scared to do. He's going to follow the stranger past the end of the line onto the last train of the night where everyone else has gone, and finally find out what this man really is. First of all, the people watching the categories, the fidgeters and the fake sleepers. I love this part so much because it's exactly all of the stuff that we usually do. You're on a long ride, your phone's dead, and you start quietly profiling everyone in the car. I have definitely done that on a New York train many times. This story takes that totally innocent, universal little habit and uses it as the doorway into something horrible. And the decision of the monster is genuinely brilliant. The strangers are so scary because they're under designed too plain, too still nothing to look at. The writer figured out that a person who doesn't react to a screaming baby is more unsettling than any creature with claws. That's the uncanny valley in human form. Something that's shaped like a person but is missing the thing that makes them human. There's also this line in the original that I can't stop thinking about the idea that the mind recoils from certain things the way that it does from big spiders, because it just looks wrong. That captures the horrors of this story so perfectly. It's not about danger. It's about wrongness. A person riding the train to nowhere forever isn't threatening you, but every instinct in your body is screaming that it shouldn't exist. And here's what makes this first part so good. There's no monster yet. Not really. The scariest thing so far is Andrew. We're watching a guy lose his entire life to an obsession that he can't explain or control before anything supernatural even happens. This story has already shown you something terrifying. How easily a normal person can come apart. And if you're not unsettled yet, just wait. Because the second he steps onto the last train, the story stops being about a man losing his mind and starts being about something much, much bigger. Yo, it's Jey USO from wwe and I'm Jimmy uso. Chumba Casino and WWE are hyped for the biggest event of the summer, SummerSlam.
- [15:27]
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I know.
- [15:28]
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He steps onto the car and for the first time his skin isn't clammy. His hands aren't shaking. His heart isn't pounding. The fear that used to grip him every time he saw a stranger is just gone. And instead of hiding, he does something that he's never done. He sits down directly across from the man, right in his line of sight. And he stares. He's daring him. React to me. See me. I know what you are. The man gives him nothing. So they ride deep into the night. At each end of the line, they get off together, sit on the bench together, wait for the next train together. Andrew watching from the corner of his eye. The man as empty as ever. The car slowly empties around them as the hours get later. Until finally it's just the two of them. Two silent watchers rolling along under the city. And then it's the last train of the night. The train reaches the end of the line. The doors slide open. The man doesn't move. Andrew can hear the last few stagglers shuffling out of the station. Somewhere behind him, the intercom dings, letting any half asleep riders know they've reached the end of the line. Still, the man doesn't move. And then Andrew hears footsteps. Someone walking car to car. A conductor checking that each one is empty before the train goes. Wherever trains go for the night, the footsteps reach their car. The conductor looks in. His eyes pass over the two of them and a puzzled look crosses his face. He blinks, then pauses, like something isn't adding up. Andrew waits for him to say something. The train's closed. The two of you need to get off. But the words never come. The conductor just gives a little confused shake of his head and walks away. He didn't tell them to leave. It's like he couldn't quite see them. The train starts moving again. It rolls for a while, loops around and stops. And now Andrew can see out the windows into the other trains on the other side, and through their windows into even more trains beyond those. He should have paid more attention to that. But he doesn't get the chance. Because that's when the man finally moves. It's small, just the faintest curl of his lip. A smile so slight that anyone who hadn't spent hours memorizing this face would have missed it. And in a low, rough voice, the man says, so here we are. Andrew's throat clamps shut. After all this time, all this watching, all the Obsession session. The thing he's been hunting just spoke to him. And pure terror floods in. It takes everything he has to choke out the question that's been eating him alive for weeks. What are you? The man ignores it completely. He just stands. The door opens and he turns back, actually turns to face Andrew for the first time, and says one word. Coming. And he walks off the train. Andrew scrambles after him, shouting, now who are you? What are you? Why do you ride the train all day? But the man doesn't slow down and doesn't look back. So Andrew follows. And the place he follows him onto is impossible. It's an enormous underground cavern, and it's full of subway trains, endless rows of them stretching out in every direction as far as Andrew can see. Sea, with lit walkways running between them. The trains go on forever, he realizes that are way too many to ever serve a single city. Andrew has no idea how long they walk. He used to have a watch, but it broke. He pulled out his phone and it just reads no signal. As they go, the man keeps stopping at certain train cars, studying them for a minute or two, then moving on. And eventually Andrew figures out why the trains aren't all the same. Long stretches of them look identical. And then suddenly they'll be a different model. A little bigger, a little smaller, a little different shape. The front of where the driver sits built a little differently. The man is looking for something. Andrew doesn't know what, but eventually he finds it. He stops in front of one set of doors and they slide open. The two of them step inside and sit down. Andrew tries one more time. Are you going to talk to me now? Nothing. He's just about decided to punch this guy right in the face when the lights in the car flick on and the engine rumbles to life. And the man gives him a look that's almost sad. Then he says, you can't go back, you know. Andrew asks what that means, but the man doesn't answer. The train lurches into motion, rolls for a few minutes and slows down for a stop. And for the first time, the man's blank eyes sharpen and Andrew realizes the guy is actually looking at him now, not just facing his direction. He says very quietly, be still. Be silent. Don't catch their attention. The train stops, the doors open and they flood in. Andrew's eyes take it all in before his brain will let him understand it. The strange clothes, the arms that are too long, hands hanging down almost to the floor, the angular faces, the jet black eyes and the skin a sick, dead blue gray. For one second, his mind won't process what he's staring at. And when it finally does, he almost screams. His heart feels like it's going to explode. His vision swims and he gets sick, but his mouth is quite clamped shut, so he forces himself to swallow it back down because the words are pounding in his head. Be still. Be silent. Don't catch their attention. And so he does the only thing that he can do. He sits there, perfectly still, blank, expressionless. Exactly like a stranger. The conductor. That's the moment that the story really gets to me. Up until then, you can still explain. Explain everything away. The two normal guys, just a weirdo. Andrew is just obsessive, and this is all in his head. But then a regular subway employee looks right at the two people sitting in his car and can't process that they're there. That's when you realize the rules of reality have already been bent. And here's the part that gives me chills. It's not just the stranger that the conductor can't see. It's Andrew, too. By this point, Andrew has already started to change. The story never says it out loud. It just shows you a man who's slowly becoming invisible and lets you do the math. At the central hub, the infinite train's going forever in every direction. That image is just incredible. If you heard our Backrooms episode, it's that very specific horror of an in between place that's just wrong because it goes on forever with no logic and no. No exit. But the strangers was telling this kind of story way before Liminal Spaces had a hashtag. And it added something that the backrooms didn't have. The doors. Because every one of those infinite trains opens into something else. But the line that actually scares me the most isn't the monsters at all. It's. You're never going to be able to go back. The horror of this story was. Was never really the blue gray things with the long arms. It's the doors closing behind you. The moment you realize that home, the regular boring world that you were desperate to escape on your commute every day, is now somewhere that you can never, ever reach again. And here's the universal hook for me. Every single one of us has had that version of the blank subway face. We zone out. We put in headphones, we stare at nothing. We go somewhere in our heads where our bodies sit in a metal box, hurling through the dark. There's a phrase in the original that's been living in my brain, present but not accounted for. That's for all of us on a bad commute. And this story asks the worst possible question about that blankness. What if in some of those faces there's nothing beneath it?
- [24:45]
A
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- [26:22]
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So Andrew survives that first ride. He sits frozen and blank for hours, maybe days. Time doesn't work down there and the creatures pay him no attention at all. And when the train finally returns to that endless cavern and it's just the two of them again, Andrew breaks. He collapses onto the floor and stuck sobs while the man watches, expressionless. When he can finally speak, he begs, take me home, please. And the man tells him the truth. He can't. He doesn't know which of these endless trains would lead Andrew back, if any of them do. Then he stands and walks out onto the platform. And when Andrew follows, the man turns on him suddenly. Sharp, you followed me long enough. And all the rage Andrew used to feel, the rage that the fear had buried, comes roaring back. He rushes the man, grabs him by the shoulders and slams him against the side of a train car, screaming, what did you do to me? Take me back. The man just takes it, lets himself be thrown against the metal, over and over, completely passive. And eventually Andrew runs out of fury and just crumbles, begging again. And the man explains the rule that runs the whole nightmare. He says if they stay together, they're more likely to get noticed. So Andrew has to go on his own way. He has to stay still, stay subtle. And the creatures will keep mistaking him for one of their own. And then the man says the thing that explains everything. The thing he becomes, the thing every stranger becomes. You'll do it, too. Sometimes you get stuck. He brushes Andrew's hands off of his shoulders and turns to leave. But before he does, he says, I'm sorry. Then the man puts his finger on Andrew's forehead. And that's the last thing that he remembers after that. Something has changed in Andrew. He understands now what the man was doing and what he needs to do. So he starts riding trains on his own. Back and forth, forth, staying still and silent the whole time, no matter what gets on. Until he realizes after a while, he starts looking like them. And the only way he's allowed to get off and back onto the hub so he can look for his train home is if one of the other riders starts watching him. That's what getting stuck means. That's when someone goes too long without noticing you. And Andrew realizes that he has to either take his new companion with him, dooming them to his same fate, or kill them. Most of the time, he chooses the second option. By the time he's writing this story, he's killed 15 of them and he's decided he won't do it anymore. That's why he wrote this, to warn everyone he could not make the same mistake that he did, saying that if you're reading this to find his mom and to tell her that he's okay, that he's trying to come home. But he admits that that's not really true. Until now he's been picturing himself like Odysseus the hero, lost at sea, trying to find his way back to familiar shores. But he says that he was wrong. He's not lost at sea. The sea is wild and natural and nobody built it. He's lost in a labyrinth. And that's a huge difference because a labyrinth is designed. Somebody or something thing built this impossible place. Which means somebody is responsible for what's been done to him. And if he can, he's going to tear the whole thing down and destroy whoever made it. I love the twist of how someone becomes a stranger. Every stranger you've ever felt that prickle of wrongness around was once a person exactly like Andrew. Someone who got curious, who made the wrong choice. And this horrible self replicating chain. And you're never sure watching one on a train, whether you're looking at a predator or the next person about to be turned. And I love this ending too. Most creepypastas end with the narrator broken or warning you or just gone. This one ends with the victim looking at the maze that ate him and deciding he'd rather be the monster at the center of it than the prey. He doesn't end up going home. Instead, he's planning to make whoever built this prison regret it. So let's talk about some parts of the story that have made it so famous. There's a detail fans love to point out that I think actually adds to the horror, even though it's technically a flaw. See, the story takes place in New York City, but it gets little things about the city wrong. The narrator calls it the Metro. And I don't know if you know me, you know I lived in New York for a while and nobody actually calls it the Metro. And the subway in the story stops running late at night when the real New York subway runs around the clock. So a lot of readers figure that the writer probably never actually lived there. But think about what that does to the story. It means that the New York of the strangers is a city remembered slightly wrong. A city that's all almost right, but just a little bit off. Just like the strangers themselves. The whole thing has this faint dreamlike inaccuracy baked right in. And once you start to notice it, the city in the story starts to feel like just as uncanny as the people riding through it. What this story really is underneath the subway and the monsters is a Liminal space horror. The fear of the in between spaces, the transitional spaces that exist only to move you from one spot to another. And it was doing that years before the backrooms turned it into an Internet obsession. But the Strangers found a flavor all of its own. Because most monster stories are about a creature that hunts you, this one is about a place that processes you. It doesn't kill you. It wears you down until you're just another blank face on the train. The scariest transformation in the whole story isn't the blue gray skin or the long arms. It's the blankness. Andrew doesn't get eaten by a monster. He slowly turns into one. And the engine that drives the entire thing is the single most ordinary experience in modern life. A commute. And here's the part that genuinely keeps me up. This story has a real world echo, and it's right under New York City. There are abandoned subway stations down there. They're called ghost stations. And the most famous one is City hall, the original showpiece of the New York Subway, with vaulted tiled ceilings and skylights and chandeliers. It opened in 1904 and closed in 1945 because its curved platforms was too tight for the longer trains that they were building. But it's still down there. The sixth train used it as a turnaround loop. And if you stay on that train past its very last stop, which you're not really supposed to, you'll ride right through it for a few seconds. You'll catch this flash of a beautiful, empty, frozen station in the dark, and then the train loops back around and you'll return to the present. A glimpse of somewhere you were never meant to see, right at the end of the line. And here's another part where the real world comes in. When the subway first opened back in 1904, the novelty of it was so thrilling that reportedly some writers spent entire evenings just writing it back and forth, end to end, for hours, going nowhere for the sheer joy of it. And that's the thing about the Strangers. Andrew ends his message swearing he's trying to come home. And you can tell from the way that he writes it, he doesn't believe it himself. He knows that there's no train back, that there's just the next stop and the next and the next. So the next time that you're on a late train and the car empties out and it's just down to you and one silent person across the aisle, the one who's a little too still, a little too blank, present but not accounted for, this is why you shouldn't look too closely. This is why you shouldn't follow your curiosity. And whatever you do, don't ride to the end of the line. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about Andrew's story? Have you ever noticed someone on a train or on a bus that just seemed off a little too. Still a little too blank? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. If you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. I'll be back next week with another story guaranteed to keep you up at night. Until then, stay curious and remember, there's no reason to fear the dark unless you try to hide from it.
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The moment a body is found, the clock starts ticking 48 hours before the trail goes cold. From AE and Crime House, this is the official podcast from the famous true crime series the first 48. I'm Carter Roy. Every Thursday I revisit a landmark homicide investigation in depth with long form storytelling built for your ears. Listen to and follow the First 48 on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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A
Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A and E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.