The NoSleep Podcast — Season 23, Episode 15 (October 12, 2025)

Overview

This episode from The NoSleep Podcast, hosted by David Cummings, continues its tradition of delivering richly atmospheric horror with a collection of spine-tingling original stories. The overarching theme is entrapment and the terror of being unable to escape, whether due to supernatural forces, psychological torment, or warped reality. The episode is presented as part of WNSP’s “Darkness of the Night” and includes new audio installments of “Goat Valley Campgrounds.”

Listeners are lured into unsettling worlds: an exclusive restaurant with gruesome ingredients, a family haunted by their son's monstrous affliction, a disturbing sentient doll, and a campground where otherworldly rules dictate survival. Each tale explores what happens when someone—or something—is trapped in a relentless, horrifying circumstance.

Episode Structure and Stories

Opening: Setting the Mood in Cryptid Valley

[00:00–02:50]

• DC, the overnight host for WNSP, shares local folklore about “ant men” in Cryptid Valley, setting a tone of unease and supernatural realism.
  • “Don’t assume these creatures exist only in Greek mythology. This is Cryptid Valley... we know the difference between myth and reality.” (DC, 01:12)

Segment 1: “La Table de Georges” by L.N. Hunter

[07:25–23:40]

Summary

A decadent and increasingly grotesque tale of a "foodie" patron and his chef, whose pursuit of extraordinary culinary sensations spirals into horror.

Key Points

• The unnamed narrator reminisces about decadent meals at La Table de Georges, an exclusive restaurant founded by himself and Chef Henri Georges (formerly Georges Henri)—a relationship forged in the Boer War.
• Henri’s cuisine features rare, live, and ethically dubious ingredients:
  • “Flesh is sweeter and richer when carved directly from a living creature. Georges has organized a network of extremely specialized suppliers around the globe...” (Narrator, 13:12)
• The evening’s main course involves eating cuttlefish that revive in the stomach and release a neurotoxin, intended to provide intoxicating euphoria—antitoxins are mixed in the sauce.
• The narrator is paralyzed mid-meal; Chef Georges frantically tries to administer the antidote too late.
• In a grotesque scene, cuttlefish emerge from the narrator’s nose and mouth, consuming him from within as he becomes a passive observer of his own destruction.

Notable Quotes

• "The taste of my own blood is loathsome, but soon the creatures have consumed a sufficient amount of my tongue that my taste buds no longer function. I should be terrified, but some miasmatical quality of the creature's toxin dulls my senses and stills my emotions..." (Narrator, 20:50)

Segment 2: “Delightful Little Doll” by Michael Serreur

[26:52–30:20]

Summary

A short, unnerving story about a young girl resisting her mother's pressure to play with her new doll, which turns out to be chillingly sentient.

Key Points

• A mother gives her daughter a new doll, trying to distract her from grief ("Are you still upset about Daddy?").
• The girl pulls the doll’s string; the doll repeatedly pleads for help and claims to be trapped.
• The girl attempts to heed the doll’s instructions to set it free.
• The mother finds the daughter gone and the doll—a now chilling vessel—cries out in her daughter's voice, as the mother responds, “Don’t worry baby. You are home and Mommy isn’t ever gonna let you go.” (Mother, 29:50)

Notable Quotes

• “There’s a switch under my foot. Flip it. That will set me free.” (Doll, 28:43)
• “A jagged smile spread across her mother’s face as she cradled the doll in her arms.” (Narrator, 29:42)

Segment 3: “Edgar” by Christopher Sweet

[33:27–71:05]

Summary

A deeply psychological and body-horror laden narrative, chronicling nanny Meredith's time with the troubled Weiss family and their son Edgar, who suffers violent, inexplicable “fits”—culminating in a horrifying revelation years later.

Key Points

• Meredith, an inexperienced but practical young woman, is hired by the wealthy Weiss family as a nanny for their sweet but troubled son, Edgar.
• Edgar develops fits where he seems compelled to try to remove his own head, growing more violent over time.
  • “He twisted his head around and looked at me with miserable, pleading eyes. ‘Get it off.’” (Meredith recalling Edgar, 45:03)
• The father is absent and emotionally withdrawn; the mother and Meredith develop a bond as they struggle to care for Edgar.
• An especially harrowing birthday party incident sees Edgar try to stab his own neck with a fork, resulting in hospitalization and commitment to a psychiatric institution.
• After many years apart, Meredith is called back to a now desolate Goldfinch Manor. She finds evidence of violence and, in a climactic horror scene, discovers Mrs. Weiss dead, cradling the monstrous, fully emerged, tendrilous creature that was once Edgar.
• The story closes with traumatized Meredith haunted still by squelching, familiar sounds at night, accepting her inescapable connection to Edgar’s inhuman fate.

Notable Quotes

• “He was trying for so long to be free. Now he can be himself. My son.” (Mrs. Weiss, 67:39)
• “I can see... the same brown as the eyes of the child I once loved as my own.” (Meredith, 67:36)
• “And when I am finished writing this, I will go to him. Now that his mother is gone, I’m all Edgar has left.” (Meredith, 71:01)

Segment 4: “Goat Valley Campgrounds” (Season 2, Chapter 4) by Bonnie Quinn

[72:14–93:21]

Summary

The latest serialized installment of the fan-favorite “Goat Valley Campgrounds” narrative, blending oral folklore, camp mystery, and lurking horror.

Key Points

• Kate, the campground manager, reflects on why alternate worlds in folklore feel less wondrous and more dangerous now.
  • “The wardrobe is nothing but a dusty wardrobe, and our Narnias are tattered remnants, declining into forgotten graveyards for the creatures they still house.” (Kate, 72:26)
• Rule number five: If the world turns gray and desaturated, you're not in the campsite—seek a hilltop and beg for return; “pray that it’s in a benevolent mood.”
• Kate’s uncle, Mike, recounts a past incident of entering the “gray world” (a sinister, parallel forest dimension), where being lost leads to fatal peril.
• Mike and some stranded campers ascend a hill, pursued by a monstrous, bird-like entity. Only Mike escapes, but at the cost of abandoning the others.
• The “master” of the gray world is described as a gigantic, incomprehensible skeletal bird.
• The episode ends on family tragedy, suspicion, and preparations: Kate warns even her family to “trust no one,” as supernatural scheming threatens the camp’s safety.

Notable Quotes

• “Trust me least of all. I’m the one asking everyone to risk their lives for my campground.” (Kate, 92:39)
• “I suppose they’re still in the gray world. My uncle never talked much about how he escaped. He’d end the story abruptly... Yet he didn’t want to talk about what he found at the top of the hill.” (Kate, 86:15–86:56)
• “We can say our apologies to each other once it’s done. But until then, we cannot forget that those things are out there and they don’t play fair. They hunt us. They kill us. And unless we want to be out here again laying another body in the ground, we can’t afford to go easy on ourselves.” (Kate, 92:15)

Timestamps for Essential Segments

• [00:00] — Cryptid Valley host DC sets the mood, segues into NoSleep Podcast
• [07:25] — "La Table de Georges" (story begins)
• [26:52] — "Delightful Little Doll" (story begins)
• [33:27] — "Edgar" (story begins)
• [72:14] — "Goat Valley Campgrounds" (Chapter 4)
• [92:39] — Kate’s chilling final warning, “Trust me least of all...”

Conclusion

Season 23, Episode 15 of The NoSleep Podcast delivers a full course of horror: tales of human (and inhuman) appetites gone awry, the suffocating bonds of family, the sinister workings of folklore, and the unknowable creatures lurking behind the familiar. The episode’s quietly apocalyptic tone is laced with dread and a sense that, trapped or not, there may be no true escape from what stalks us through the worlds we inhabit—and the worlds we can only glimpse at the edge of night.

Stay sleepless.