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- [00:00]
Narrator
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
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Co-narrator
sound, please check the description to check out my other two podcasts.
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Narrator
And if you want to get rid
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Co-narrator
of all of the ads, you can subscribe for just $2.99 a month. Last thing, I really appreciate you being
- [00:18]
Narrator
here and I'd really love if you
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Co-narrator
would follow the podcast and come back again soon. Thank you so much.
- [00:24]
Narrator
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. 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 to 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. 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.
- [05:26]
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Narrator
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 downed 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 were 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 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 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 then 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 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, they had heard a single gun.
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Narrator
out in the woods Charl His Own Life by the time Arthur made it back from his trip into town, his entire family had been murdered. Folks at the town's general store had gotten word that something awful had happened and someone in the town offered to give Arthur a ride back to the family farm. When he reached his home, the police had already arrived and a crowd began to gather in the woods. Police found footprints indicating that Charlie had been pacing around a tree for some time before taking his life. Next to his body were letters to both his parents. Some accounts reported that Charlie had placed stones over the eyes of his dead family members as well as cushioning their heads with them. To this very day, no one is certain what exactly drove Charlie Lawson to slaughter his entire family, with the exception of young Arthur, before taking his life. Some speculate that Lawson had been abusing Marie and that she may well have been pregnant with an inbred child at the time of her death. Others have insisted that Charlie could not have had the capacity to commit the heinous acts that occurred on the family farm that Christmas Day, and that the entire thing had been staged to frame Charlie. A more credible explanation is that Charlie had developed a medical condition that affected his actions and caused him to experience a psychotic break. Perhaps he had knocked his screw loose after suffering a head injury while digging a ditch on the farm. Or, as some reported, he had some kind of painful growth on his chest that had him in constant agony, and he had decided to end it all and take his family with him. The killing attracted so much attention that an estimated 5,000 curiosity seekers attended the Lawson family funeral. They were all buried in a single large plot in the private Browder family cemetery just outside of Germanton. The house became a macabre tourist attraction after the incident, and Charlie's brother decided to open the house to the public, charging admission for tours of the property. Still on the counter sat the cake that Marie had been making. Even after the house had been closed, the cake made its rounds in traveling dime museums. Protective plastic had to be used to cover the cake. After several onlookers swiped some raisins, the cake toured for at least a decade before surviving family members buried the cake along with the awful memories that came with it. Though the home was later demolished, the area still has enough spooky history to have inspired ghost sightings of the doomed Lawson children and the murderous Charlie Lawson. Unbelievably, the tragedy of the Lawson family didn't end in 1929. In 1945, James Arthur Lawson, the only child to survive the Christmas Day bloodshed, died at the age of 31 in a truck accident in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, quite near Germanton. He was buried in the same cemetery as the rest of his family, leaving behind four children of his own. When news of Arthur's death reached the local community, rumors of a family curse abounded. They insisted that Charlie had reached out to claim his son from beyond the grave. The murders also inspired the famed bluegrass duo the Stanley Brothers to pen a suitably morbid tune recounting the Lawson family fate. The song includes the following they say he killed his wife at first, while the little ones did cry Please Papa, won't you spare our lives? It is so hard to die. This experience happened to my wife. She doesn't know I'm telling this, so please don't tell her. I just think and hope that someone out there had a similar experience. It's too uncanny for just my wife to see. Please message me wherever you find this. Comments DMs I don't care she needs help soon. Being a fan of the paranormal since I was basically just out of diapers, I live for the scary, strange and dark. I'll put this here right now. Though I do not believe in anything paranormal, I have never seen anything or heard anything that I could not explain. I love the feeling of being scared and the talent of writers and filmmakers for making scary things come to life. That being said, when I met my future wife almost 20 years ago, she told me this experience she had that still sticks with her and over the next two decades she has never changed the story when it has come up. I met my beautiful wife at an engagement party. I honestly don't even remember who it was for because I've lost touch and I'm pretty sure they are not together anymore. I do know that I was brought by a friend of a friend and my future wife was a friend of the bride to be. I had been eyeing her all night, striking in her green dress, totally complimenting her auburn hair and hazel eyes with a side of envy. She made her way to the bar and I finally worked the nerve up to talk to her. That's all I wanted. Just to talk, get in. Even if it didn't lead to anything. I just had to be around her for the moment. Thankfully she dismissed my diarrhea of the mouth when I tried to just say hello. The rest is kind of history, as they say. But during that first conversation, when I finally felt comfortable and knew she was kind of into me too, I asked one of my standard questions to anyone I just met. What's the scariest thing you've ever seen in your life? It's an open question and could be taken a few ways. Scary as in near death experience? Scary as in seeing someone get hit by a speeding vehicle, or scary as in seeing something unexplainable? I've already explained that I'm into freaky, spooky stuff. I'll take any answer, but I always hope for the scary option. I've seen two witches in my mirror as a child and they still follow me. She spoke this to me with the seriousness of Daniel Day freaking Lewis carrying out a pivotal scene. Most people I ask this question of try to negate their scary experience, but not her. She was almost ready to tell someone about this. I was enamored just watching her talk. Her beauty and grace washed over me like a warm August night. But when the details of her story started to pierce through my schoolboy like crush, I started to sober up. She told me that when she turned about 13 she started to get into Wiccan stuff. That movie, the Craft had just came out. Man, if you weren't around, you don't get how much that influenced the female community. She and her friends read the Wiccan stuff, made recipes and spells and watched the craft continuously.
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Co-narrator
One night, going to bed, she sees
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Narrator
something in the corner of her mirror. She has one of those large wardrobes handed down from a great grandmother. A mirror sat on top of maybe six drawers, three on either side. The right corner starts to glow ever so lightly. It's gray, just enough to notice if you were looking right at it. I shiver as I think of a
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13 year old Billy.
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Narrator
That's what everyone called her. Her real name is Margaret. Still don't know the story. Staring at her mirror, watching these two specters come to life in front of her eyes. As I've said, I don't subscribe to the actual thought of paranormal experiences. But hers stuck with me. Not because we're married now. I had no idea we would be at the time. She described the faces in such detail, such horrifying detail. And I watched her face as she did. It changed into pure horror. So many years later, the horror has subsided, but whenever it comes up, she still has that hint of terror. To this day, years later and married for almost 12 years, she has never changed the story of what she saw. What puts this over the edge for me is that for a brief time when we were just engaged, her father let us live in his home. The same home where she grew up. In the same home she saw the witches, as she called them. The home that still contained that mirror dresser. I won't admit I have seen or felt anything like she did. But I do look into that mirror and I do not like the feeling that I get. For about five years I worked corporate security for one of the richest families in Detroit, Michigan. The Ilitch family has cemented themselves into the zeitgeist of American history. Mike and Marion Ilitch founded Little Caesar's Pizza, a small one store pizza shop led to a billion dollar company. It includes owning two major sport franchises, several entertainment venues and multiple food distributing companies. I was based in their headquarters inside of the Fox Theater located in downtown Detroit. The legendary Fox theater franchise used to have dozens of locations around the country. Now there's three left, I think. One here in Detroit, one in St. Louis, Missouri and I don't know the last one without looking it up. One of my major duties was checking the Fox office building and theater after hours to make sure everything was secure. During the day, it ran as normal. At night. Well, if you could imagine walking through an almost 70 year old theater at night, you can see how freaky it could be. We had several shows per day, especially during the summer. Even during the off season we had a lot of kids shows like Thomas the Train, Sesame street and various Christmas like shows. One seemingly normal night, I made my rounds. I tried to make my way through the theater as quickly as I could. The lights were all off. I worked an 11pm to 7am shift. The city was usually dead at that time. When going into the backstage area during the first run of a Sesame street show for the first time, I saw something that would eventually lead me to finding a new job. A show like Sesame street that runs for almost three weeks brings a lot of logistical issues. There are so many costumes, so many actors. They have to keep the costumes clean and ready for the next show. They usually do two or three shows per day, sometimes even four or five on the weekends. My first time going through the bowels of the Fox theater after a Sesame street show, I naively made my way to the middle staging area. This is where the last looks would take place with artists and actors going on stage. I didn't know that they hung the mascot costumes up in this area for
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a show like this.
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Narrator
As I entered the staging area, I saw an interesting sight. The heads of Count Dracula, Ozzy and the old grumpy men sat on a shelf staring at me. Tubes ran in and out of all of them. It stopped me in my tracks. But then I quickly realized what it was and wasn't so shocked. They clean the costumes and have air going into them. But then I saw something move to my right. Frozen. A Freddy Fazbear type character standing on two feet slowly turns to face me. My stupid head can't make sense of what I'm seeing. I only describe it as the main character from Five Nights at Freddy's. Because I couldn't think of what this character was. I didn't recognize it as a Sesame street character. A decade later and the Five Nights franchise blew up like a California wildfire. How was it possible I saw the Freddy costume before that game was even an inkling in our world. He slowly made eye contact with me. As silly as that seems, I only thought one run. I exited that Hellscape staging area as
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Co-narrator
fast as I could.
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Narrator
I hit the first set of stairs I could and went down for whatever reason. Now I was in the sub basement, a place for crew and actors to make an easy, fast path to One side of the stage to the other. I took a breath Outside side of one of the bathrooms for the crew and staff.
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Co-narrator
What did I just see?
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Narrator
Was that the wind?
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Co-narrator
Did I really just see a bear
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like humanoid animatronic turn to face me? There's no way I am trying to make sense of this. I am a rational person. I don't believe in sentient Sesame street characters.
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Co-narrator
It's just a show.
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Narrator
Satisfied that I suffered from an overactive imagination, I laughed off my embarrassment and continued my theater check. What an idiot for running from a costume. I need to make sure all the bathrooms are locked as part of my regular nightly duties, so I continued with the one that I'm standing right outside of. Now that I actually look at it, the door is about 2 inches open. This shouldn't be possible. The door is heavy. Everything in this theater is old and made from strong materials from decades ago. No plastic, no composite.
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Co-narrator
The door should be closed.
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Narrator
I squinted my eyes and took one cautious step toward the door. With a deep breath and a shaky hand, I reached out to push the door open. Make sure no one was inside. As my fingertips were less than a centimeter away from the door, it slammed shut in my face with an unnatural force. I could feel the reverb and the wind go through me as if a small nuclear bomb went off. I didn't stay to investigate. I turned tail and found my way to the exit as soon as I could. Before I knew it, I was finally outside. The world around me finally started again. Street lights turned red and green. Cars and trucks whirled by. The smells of the sewer entered my nostrils. I never thought I would be so happy to smell the crap smells of the city. Better than seeing a sentient bear and whatever slammed that bathroom door in my face. In high school, I worked as a junior electrician at a large theme park. There were maybe eight or 10 senior electricians above me. We fixed and maintained the electrical components of the roller coasters and other rides. One particular senior electrician, Frank, was my
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boss and my job was to assist
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him in whatever he was doing. I started off following him around, handing him tools as needed. Then I gradually learned the ropes. He would send me across the park on my own to fix whichever ride happened to have an issue. I worked at this park for three summers, so I got to know Frank pretty well. He was in his early 50s, rather slim, and had a thin, neatly trimmed mustache. He was also as straight laced as they come. Super religious, wouldn't even work on Sundays. Also vehemently against drugs and Alcohol. Anyway. One day, the third summer I worked there, I showed up to the park as usual to start my shift. I reported to the electrician station, where Frank was already busy doing paperwork. He said hello, and then instructed me to take my toolbox across the park to the kiddie station where a certain ride needed fixing. I gathered my stuff and had just started to leave when Frank called my name. I turned around, thinking he had forgotten to tell me a detail about the ride or something like that. He looked me dead in the eyes and I was immediately taken aback by his expression. It was blank and emotionless, nothing like his normal demeanor. Something was off. Yeah, Frank, I answered. What he said next is permanently etched in my memory because of the sheer bizarreness of it. While maintaining eye contact with this same dull, emotionless expression. He spoke very clearly, in a monotone voice quite different from his normal speech. The Space Indians are coming, he said. I stared at him for a few seconds, puzzled and unsure how to respond. He kept looking at me for a moment, then seemed to snap out of it, turning around and going back to his paperwork. What's that? I asked, pretending I had misheard him. Frank ignored the question, telling me without turning around now in his normal voice,
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Co-narrator
to hurry up and get the kiddie ride fixed.
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I obeyed, but kept thinking about the weirdness of the incident for the rest of the day. I had no idea who or what these Space Indians were, and the look in Frank's eyes when he said it was deeply unsettling. Eventually, I forgot about the incident, and the next few weeks of work were uneventful. Then one day near the end of summer, it all came rushing back. I arrived at the park one morning in late August, and Frank was standing in the parking lot alone between the rows of vehicles, looking up at the sky. The fact that he was standing there immediately caught my attention and as I climbed out of my car, because he had gotten to the electrician station before me every morning for all three summers that I had worked there, he was extremely punctual. Now suddenly he's standing there, late for work, staring at the sky. I walked up to him and said something casual, probably Morning Frank or something like that.
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Co-narrator
He slowly shifted his gaze from the
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sky and looked me dead in the eye. My head started spinning as I realized he was staring at me with the same blank expression he had weeks earlier when he said the weird thing about Space Indians. We looked at each other for a few seconds, then he spoke in that same monotone voice as before, very different
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Co-narrator
from his normal speech.
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He said the Space Indians are here now. It's too bad. Then he suddenly turned on his heels and walked away. Walked right out of the parking lot. I asked where he was going, but he didn't respond. He turned out of the parking lot onto a small side street and disappeared. I never saw or heard from him again. A week later I was assigned to work with a new senior electrician. I asked him what happened to Frank, but he acted like he didn't know who I meant. I even asked the main boss of the hiring department. He told me no one by Frank's name had ever worked there. I am baffled by the whole thing. To this day, Not every town is lucky enough to have a placid bay just beyond its downtown strip. Most aren't fortunate enough to have residents that all know one another, who move with unity to run the town like it's a fifth grade baseball game that keeps parents up until 11pm the dream of a happier life rings through every church bell and backyard radio in this little town, though, a town where the bright green grass is cut in organized lines and the little shops along the
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beach all have sand gathered on their doormats.
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The cascading spray of the sea constantly glides across everything it can reach, covering the Town of Dreams in a salty fog, leaving only faded footprints and ripple marks behind. I was told that any moment of
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that town could be captured in a
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photograph and put on a billboard for
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the world to see how happy life was there. And nothing captures that better than the
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footprints that are left on the beach every morning. A father and a daughter, knowing that
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they will be able to race the sunrise to the water if they leave early enough, rush to the docks as they always do. There isn't even breakfast in their stomachs, but they are too full of excitement
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to eat anymore anyways, and so they start their journey.
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After a brief sprint down the wide residential street and along the sturdy wooden dock beyond it, the daughter finally wins
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her race against the light.
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As it cracks its glowing light through the rolling waves, the father and daughter walk, their closely aligned footprints telling the world about their love.
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The bigger shoes take the side closest
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to the waters, as always, and the
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footprints of his little girl take more
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than one detour in a useless attempt
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to pursue some distraction.
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Those footprints are their story, and they tell it every day. One day, though, their story changed. It was one of the few days
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that I didn't work the graveyard shift
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Co-narrator
at the fire station the night before, a rare moment where I let the sun win its race against me. Those two adventurous souls didn't let that happen, though, and they went out as they always did on a windy morning. But just after they departed from the dock and made their first imprints on the sand, the footprints veered off and walked into the ocean without a single
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break in the pattern.
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Co-narrator
It was an act as confident as the crashing of the waves, one with no fear or even any knowledge of another way of existing. And after those waves receded, only one set of footprints returned. The father, the man who saw two stars ahead of him when he lost that race to the beach, had thrown
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his daughter to the sea like she
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was a backpack that was hurting his shoulders. It was almost like the waves had been writhing that day in a hopeful attempt to give her back. But not even the power of the deep could return a resident that was sent there too soon. As I sit on a bench overlooking the dock's below, I bring a steaming cup of coffee up to my dry mouth, desperately craving the energy to fully open my eyes. The warmth of the mug in my hands forces that dreadful wind away. This town has never had so many windy mornings this consistently, and the wind has never been so loud. It drowns out my desire to do anything but look out at the beach, the footprint covered beach and the man walking across it. My body freezes solid as I pour all of my strength into tracking the figure with my eyes. He's blacker than the moon kissed sand of the beach, and the murky moonlight offers nearly no help in making out anything more than a tall and shadowy outline. There's something incomplete about it, as if I'll be able to see right through
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it if I decide to walk closer to it.
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Co-narrator
His walk seems unfinished too. It's slower than it should be, and his feet trudge beneath him as if the sand he steps on is as wet as the ocean floor. He looks like the subject of an old and faded photograph, one crushed under the weight of an entire shelf of albums and papers. I start to feel that same crushing force he seems to feel as I continue to stare at him. The entire weight of the world seems to want to fall onto my shoulders until I fall through the stone terrace that's holding me up. But it's not the world bearing down on me, it's my own body shutting down. Drowsiness almost overtakes me, and I clumsily splash my last sips of hot coffee all over my face to keep myself from falling. But it doesn't work. In that moment of pain and alertness and fear, I finally feel the figure's attention land on me and seconds later I feel the cold stone catch my and seconds later I feel the cold
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- [51:16]
Co-narrator
one month later it took a while for me to visit the beach again. Town lit up with a series of reports of missing children. Almost two per week. Nothing is ever supposed to happen in this town. After one death pushed its way in, more found the fracture in our sense of safety and immediately rushed in. Everybody thought it was somehow all connected, but nothing ever actually proved that until one of the bodies washed back up on the beach. The only thing that could have done that was a storm or an unheard of wonder of nature. And we don't get storms around here. I'm glad I was sitting at the beach that day. Work took up most of the last few weeks and pure dread kept me from using my little free time to take the walk to my usual morning spot. As I finally walk up in this still moment, the first thing I notice is the breeze. It's nothing like the howling wind that still rages through my memory. Finding new confidence, I finish the walk and end up all the way on the beach proper. There I notice the footprints, or I suppose I should say footprint. The sand is only covered by a slight single line of marks, as if only one shoe had been planted in the sand by a person who was hopping along the beach earlier in the morning. But people who hop don't drag their feet. And there's something about these footprints that
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don't sit well with me.
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They leave torturous, drawn out marks in the disturbed sand and they shift and shake with the unsteadiness of a dust storm. I follow the prince with my eyes right up to the figure standing only a few dozen yards away from me. What faces me is half of the shape of a man and the other half dissolving into a mist of sand and floating gently into the ocean. The solid half, the part of him that isn't standing over moving water looks coarse and damaged by time. He is standing more still than any human ever could. Stiller than the pictures of this very beach that I have hanging in my house. I know right away what I'm staring at. There is only one man that I've ever seen make his mark on this beach at this early hour. The man that took his daughter there to find happiness. The same man that took his daughter there to meet her final moments. We never truly know what other people hide from the world, afraid that the parts of themselves that they find in dreams will make themselves real. We sleep at dead of night to keep that sinister spirit at bay. Giving it only the briefest glimpses of a fabricated life that is freed from any morality. Nothing is more terrifying than that version of ourselves, the one that exists only
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to disagree with the world.
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Inside of that father was a darker half, a second piece of his being that was forced to become part of the earth as his better half searched
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for his daughter in the sea.
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Now that is the only part of him that is left to make footprints in the sand that has so relentlessly taken him. I watch as he walks his path, the pure evil making its way way along the beach as his older, kinder soul fades away from that horrible frame,
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desperate to escape to a place where
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his daughter can finally rest. As if he knows I am making the horrific realization of what I'm looking at. The dark figure turns to face me, his thin frame twisting and warping like a broken branch caught in a hurricane. He then begins to take those dreadful steps towards me. With every footprint he leaves, another maddening thought crashes its way into my mind. I think about the sensation of my fear doubling down on me. I think about the plight of this man's poor daughter. I think about all the people that never had any idea that the mourning man in front of me had kept this true monster hidden from the entire world without a single trace to be seen. I think about the heart sinking feeling of powerlessness that I imagine the daughter felt in the moment she felt herself submit to her horrible father. Drowsiness invades my mind as if I can't even stay lucid long enough to come to terms with a world that allows such evil to overcome all those things that are good and pure. It isn't a world I want to exist in that father shouldn't be able to outlive his daughter. And I don't want to watch him leave those lonely footprints in the sand every morning. The manifesto of his deceptions. I let the soft feeling of dread wash over me. And it doesn't take long for the waves to wash over me too. To my brother, I'm sure I'm just another victim of his fading soul.