Transcript
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Narrator/Host (1:00)
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Storyteller/Guest (1:28)
1-800-contacts. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you'd like to hear more stories like these with a different background sound, please check the description to check out my other two podcasts. And if you want to get rid of all of the ads, you can subscribe for just 2.99amonth. Last thing, I really appreciate you being here and I'd really love if you would follow the podcast and come back again soon. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy. Most people don't even believe me when I tell them, but I have a job where I work from home. People in my area mostly work with cars or in the medical industry. There aren't many jobs where I live. Thankfully, I was able to land a decent paying job that let me work from my home office. It definitely comes with its struggles, but it is hands down the best job opportunity available to me right now. It isn't always perfect. It definitely comes with its pitfalls. Sometimes you have to sit at your computer even when there isn't any work to be done. It's also very easy to get distracted. But I think my biggest problem has to do with the house itself itself. It's kind of creepy. The house itself is an old Victorian, like really old. We're talking mid-1800s. A family friend owned the house and sold it to me for a very fair price, basically gave it to me. I was super excited because it meant I got a nice big house to live in by myself, along with my girlfriend. I'm a natural loner and don't really care for social interaction. So I had a nice big house all to myself and girlfriend and a job where I worked from home with very minimal social interaction with other people. That was basically my ideal life. But the house's age meant that it was going to be scary at times. And I don't mean with ghosts or anything like that, but sometimes I hear the house settling or making noises that I can't explain. I've actually had quite a few instances where I'll be sitting down and doing some work and then out of nowhere I hear a noise that I just can't rationalize. I go exploring throughout the house only to find that nothing has changed. It's as ominous as it is frustrating. I did what just about anyone else in the world would do. I started to use background noise to drown out the disturbances. First, I tried those quiet instrumentals on YouTube, you know, the ones that last five hours and they're supposed to put you at ease or something. It didn't really work for me because I couldn't get my computer to be loud enough to drown out all the noises. It was also not very good at keeping my attention. There was one week where my work was really slow and there wasn't a whole lot to do. I still had to sit at my computer, though. There was an understanding that I was allowed to basically do anything I wanted as long as I was available to my co workers if something came through that needed to be done. I didn't quite know what to do with this time and just started watching documentaries on YouTube. It actually was pretty fun. I learned a lot. So that next week when things started picking up again, I just instinctively turned on a documentary. I wouldn't be able to have all my focus on it, but it was a lot better than having some ambient noise. It actually helped distract me from the sounds of the house. I guess I just didn't have enough mental focus energy to notice any of the other sounds going on around me, if that makes any sense. Well, it had been about two weeks of me watching documentaries while I worked. Everything seemed to be good until one Friday morning. I start work at 8 and this must have happened around 10. I was sitting at my office chair working while I listened to a documentary about a 911 conspiracy theory, when all of a sudden I heard an abrupt banging noise coming from upstairs. Like I had said, I hadn't been distracted by any noises for a while by this point point. So the fact that I noticed this noise meant that it was probably serious. My fight or flight kicked in. You might laugh at me, but when I work, I keep a knife next to me. I ran upstairs with the knife and looked around for any suspicious noises. The banging had stopped and I didn't know where it had come from. I knew what section of the house that I heard it from, but there didn't seem to be anything out of place. I stood there for a few moments and then I heard it again. It happened right on the other side of my door. I immediately braced myself for there to be some kind of animal or something trying to get in. I didn't really know what to expect. I opened my door to see that the screen door had not been properly closed. My girlfriend didn't close it all the way when she left for work that morning. It was also pretty windy that day, so it was just going back and forth, causing a banging noise when the wind got bad. This was kind of a breaking point for me. I didn't want to live my life in constant paranoia and fear of some kind of attacker coming into my home. We live in a safe area. There's never been a serious threat, and I have run around my house with a knife way too many times now. I honestly felt kind of stupid. So I made a decision. I was no longer going to assume that someone was breaking in if and when I ever heard a sound. I put the knife in my dresser in my bedroom and decided that I was just going to be into work while I was working. Except for my documentary, of course. So there I was the next week. It happened on a Wednesday. I was sitting in my office doing exactly what I had set out to do. I was working, ignoring the noises and listening to a documentary. I remember the exact part of the documentary I was on when I heard it. The sound was the loudest sound I had heard in the house up to that point. At first I reassured myself that it was nothing and that I need to fight against this paranoia. The sound continued and I couldn't take my mind off it. After about five minutes of listening to what sounded like rummaging and walking, I went upstairs to check. Bear in mind, I didn't have any weapon on Me. And I was expecting some kind of reasonable explanation. When I got to my kitchen, I saw that the front door was wide open, the cabinets were all open, and there was a strange man rummaging through them. I didn't notice until after the fact, but he had been eating something. I remember screaming at him. I don't remember what I said, but it was something to the effect of what are you doing in my house? Then he just ran off, didn't say a word. He took a loaf of bread with him, but I don't think he took anything else other than what he had eaten before I came upstairs. I reasoned with myself that he must have been a homeless man or something. I don't know why else you would steal a loaf of bread from a very ordinary looking house. This was the worst thing that could have happened. On some instinctive level, it had proved all my worst fears right. There was some kind of danger in my house. And of course it was the one time when I didn't have my knife on me. I lucked out that he didn't try to hurt me or anything, but it was still horrifying to see nonetheless. I just work at a local coffee shop now. It's the only way to stay sane. Back when I was much younger, my friends and I were into urban exploring before it was even really a thing. We grew up in a pretty rough area with a lot of old apartment buildings that had to be abandoned and eventually demolished due to asbestos. That stuff made them basically fireproof, but where fire and smoke will kill you quick, asbestos will kill you slow. But try explaining that to a bunch of teenagers actively looking for somewhere to hide from grown ups so they could do some distinctively grown up things. Where other people saw a decrepit, dusty crap hole, we saw our own little corner of paradise. A home away from home. Or maybe home is too strong a word, but you get the idea anyway. There was one particular estate that was almost completely bereft of inhabitants, having been gradually relocated by the city council until there must have been no more than two or three families left over. It was like an actual ghost town. Even the local corner shop had its shutters permanently down with a For sale sign quickly following its indefinite closure. But like I said, that kind of place was our bread and butter. So when they moved out, we moved in. There was this one set of high rise flats that means apartments to you North Americans that we used to visit on the regular. The heating and other utilities had been switched off for a while and this was in the middle of winter, so we used to stash cans of cider in the old cupboards and they'd basically act like walk in fridges. It got to the point that we ended up occupying one of the flats, bringing over an old nylon string guitar and other amenities, so the place felt a bit more homey. So this one night, just after Christmas, about five of us pile into the old place to get drunk and have a sing song. I remember that we were halfway through Bowie's man who Sold the World when the off key twang of his string breaking had us all groaning with disappointment. What's more, it was the G string. Anyone who knows anything about playing a guitar will tell you break a top or bottom string and it's not the end of the world. But break your G string and nothing quite sounds the same. So there we were, basically condemned to a silent disco for the night. But it didn't dampen our spirits entirely, so we committed to staying for a few hours to at least make the most of the evening. We are all just sitting around chatting bollocks and bumming smokes off each other when one of us loudly hushes the rest of us before holding a single finger in the air as if to say listen. There's a brief silence, and I do mean silence. No one heard a thing, so the lad who had shushed everyone just put it down to him hearing things. The mood softens again quickly and we're back to drinking and hanging out. Only a little while later, the same lad does the same hushing thing. He's not alone this time, though. Another one of us swore that he too had heard something, a scratching or shuffling noise coming from the dark corridor outside the flat. If you have one lad with an attack of paranoia, it's easy to forget. If you have two lads hear the same bloody thing, you start to take things a bit more serious. One of us pokes their head out of the flat, shining the light off of his phone's screen into the darkness before turning back to tell us there was nothing there. These flats were half falling down. It was perfectly reasonable to expect them to creak and croak a fair bit. But the two guys who had heard the noises remained anxious, shooting each other nervous looks in between scanning the flat's open doorway for movement. Cut to a few hours later and it's coming up to midnight. Energy levels are dipping severely and so are the noise levels. This meant the atmospherics were perfectly attuned for us to perfectly hear the creaking of a floorboard just above our Heads. This wasn't just the rundown condition of the building either. It was painfully obvious that the slow and deliberate creak came from a footfall wall on the floor above us. Don't ask me how we knew that. Sometimes your gut just tells you everything you need to know about a certain sound or a shape in the darkness. That's how the human race has survived for so long and so successfully. There really is such a thing as a sixth sense. As soon as we hear that creak, we all freeze. I mean, proper statue, still barely even breathing, with all eyes glued to the ceiling. We start asking each other what that was. But we all knew someone or something was up there. And it had been the entire time, I should add. At this point we had managed to compile a little collective of wooden sticks, iron bars and other such debris that we told ourselves were our weapons stash. It was all just a bit of a joke, to be honest. They were purely totemic value. But in the moments that followed that horrible bloody creak, I thanked that what was holy that we had had the foresight to collect them. Each of us grabbed something to defend ourselves with before falling silent again, listening out for any other creaking sounds above us. We weren't left waiting long. Another creak, then another. Each one getting closer and closer to where the front entrance to the upstairs flat would be. We couldn't help but sit there terrified, listening as whatever was up there got closer and closer to us. When the footsteps stopped, one of us plucked up the courage to creep towards the open front door to the flat and step, stick their head out. The next thing I know we're just pouring down the stairs of the apartment block with the lad who scouted the stairs out, shouting how? There's someone up there. We were scared, maybe a little over paranoid. But over the next few days we started to question if we'd even seen what we thought we had. I remember seeing the shape of something on the stairs above us, but I wasn't 100% sure it was a man. And neither was anyone else if we were honest with ourselves. In the end, I had convinced myself that we had imagined the whole thing and decided to run a little experiment. I left a loaf of bread in the lobby of the apartment block, intending to prove that there was no one living there when the loaf was still there, growing mold a few days later. But when I went back, it was gone. Years later we watched the council demolish those flats as wrecking balls smashed into the brickwork and plastic window frames. We mourned our old hideaway, yes, but mostly we wondered if whoever was in there would be buried in the rubble. This time of year, nothing pairs better with too much food and alcohol than grim, macabre tales of murder and mayhem. This particularly ghastly tale takes place On Christmas Day 1929, on a farm outside Germanton, North Carolina. Charlie Lawson's biggest big Christmas surprise for his adoring family of nine began with a trip into town. Sparing no expense, Charlie Lawson agreed to buy each and every member of his family an outfit for their choice before taking them over to a local photographer and having a family portrait taken. Quite a costly affair for a modest tobacco farmer. Just over a week later, it would be Christmas Day, 1929. One might get the impression that Charlie was a good father who tried to bring his family the best Christmas possible, even on his meager income. But you would be wrong. On the day itself, 17 year old Marie Lawson had been busy in the kitchen preparing a fruitcake for after dinner that evening while the younger sisters, 12 year old Carrie and the 7 year old Mabel, wandered over to their aunt and uncle's house to celebrate the holidays and relieve some of the pressure on Charlie and his wife. Fanny Lawson, Charlie's spouse of 17 years, had been tending to her and Charlie's younger children while Charlie and his oldest son, 16 year old Arthur, nicknamed Buck, had planned a very special Christmas Day hunting trip, something of a year tradition for the pair. As Charlie and Arthur prepared to set out on their holiday hunting trip, they soon realized that they needed more shotgun shells if they were to have a successful hunt. Charlie sent Arthur up to the store to pick up some more ammo while he waited patiently in the tobacco barn. But when Charlie saw Carrie and Mabel walking down the path on their way back from their aunt and uncle's home, he shouldered his shotgun aimed in the direction of his young children and pulled the trigger. There is simply no telling of the absolute terror and confusion experienced by those poor girls. The instant hit of agony as clusters of buckshot slammed into their tiny bodies. The pure sense of chaos. Seeing their own father walk slowly over to their bodies, expecting him to help as any good father should, only to have him smash the butt of his shotgun over and over again into their skulls, cracking them open in the driveway on their own home. Charlie then set off towards the family home, his trusty weapon firmly in his grip. Fanny, who had been out on the front porch to investigate the gunfire, attempted to flee, but it was no good. There was no outrunning the blast. Hearing the gunshots from outside. The teenage Marie screamed bloody murder, trapped in a state of abject panic as her father racked the weapon and gunned her down in the kitchen. The youngest children heard the commotion and, fearing for their own lives, attempted to hide. Charlie quickly found them and brutally bludgeoned them to death with the butt of his weapon. Even his youngest was no quarter. Charlie killed her without hesitation, leaving a horrific mess. Then, for some unknown reason, he then placed rocks under the heads of his dead wife and children and wandered off into the woods as if in a daze. Concerned neighbors of the Lawsons initially walked over to wish them a Merry Christmas, heard the gunshots, and hurried to check on them. Instead of the festive merriment they had come to expect, they stumbled onto a grisly tableau of blood, buckshot and shattered bone before they could set out to find Charlie.