← Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:02]
A
Hi listeners, it's Heidi Wong. Before we get into today's episode of Twisted Tales, I wanted to tell you about another show that I think you'll Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhatt. Every Monday, Dr. Bhatt goes into where history gets mysterious vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery. This is crime house. There's something about a story told in real time that hits different when you read a creepypasta, you know it was written after the fact something someone sat down, crafted the whole thing and posted it as a finished piece. But what happens when the story unfolds as you're reading it? When the person telling it doesn't know the ending yet? When every update could be the last one because whatever's happening to them might finally catch up? This is the story of Dear David, the most terrifying Twitter thread you'll ever read. Welcome to Twisted, A Crime House 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. And for early access and ad free listening, subscribe to our crime house plus community on Apple Podcasts. We're also on YouTube with full videos that bring each story to life. Just search for twisted tales and be sure to like and subscribe. Today, I'm telling you about the story of Dear David. It started with a dream, turned into a Twitter thread, and became one of the most unsettling Internet horror stories ever told. And unlike most creep pastas, this one came with receipts, photos, videos, timestamps, and a narrator who put his real name and face on every single post. His name is Adam Ellis, and in the summer of 2017, he started having nightmares about a dead boy named David. Before I dive into the story, let me give you a little context, because the way this story was told is almost as important as the story itself. Most creepypastas live on forums and wikis. They're anonymous, they're written to feel real. But unless you don't know what you're reading, everyone knows that they're not. You suspend your disbelief, you enjoy the ride, and you Move on. Dear David broke those rules. It wasn't anonymous. It wasn't posted on some obscure message board. It was tweeted in real time by a verified user with a real job, a real following, and a real face. And that changed everything about how people experienced it. Because when Adam Ellis started posting about the ghost in his apartment, people didn't just read it, they followed it. It was horror as a live event and nothing like it had really been done before. At least not at that scale. The other thing that makes Dear David unique is the medium. And Adam wasn't just a writer. He was an artist who worked at buzzfeed, known for his relatable self deprecating webcomics. He had a big following already. People knew his name. They knew his face. They knew his sense of humor. So when this funny, normal Internet cartoonist suddenly started posting about something genuinely terrifying happening in his apartment, people paid attention. Because it didn't feel like a creepypasta. It felt like a friend telling you something deeply wrong was going on. And that's what makes it so effective. Whether or not you believe a word of it, the Dear David saga is a masterclass in how to make the Internet hold its breath. Okay, let's get into it. It's August 7th, 2017. Adam Ellis posted a thread on Twitter. He opens with a simple, almost casual line, the way you start telling a story at a bar, not realizing how long the night was about to get. He says he thinks his apartment is haunted. Now. Adam lived alone in a small apartment in New York City. If you've ever lived in an old building, you know the vibe. Creaky floors, thin walls, radiators that clang at 3am for no reason. These buildings have history. They have character. And sometimes they have things that aren't supposed to be there. Adam explains that it all started with a dream he had while experiencing sleep paralysis, which is something that happens to him every once in a while. In the dream, his bedroom looks exactly like it does in real life. Same furniture, same layout, same dim lighting leaking in from the street. Everything feels normal. Everything is normal. Except for the boy sitting in the green rocking chair at the foot of his bed. The boy looks like he's about 10 or 11 years old. He's sitting completely still, just watching Adam. He's silent, expressionless. Just there. And something about him is wrong. Really wrong. The right side of his head is dented inward, like something fell on it and caved in a part of his skull. Adam drew a picture of him, and it's genuinely disturbing for A while, the boy just sits there staring. And then he gets up. He shuffled towards the bed, but Adam couldn't move. The sleep paralysis had him frozen. But just as the boy was about to get to him, Adam woke up screaming. A few nights later, Adam dreamt that he was in a library and there was a girl there. She comes up to him and asks, you've seen Dear David, haven't you? Adam doesn't understand, but then she clarifies it's the boy from his apartment. She says he's dead and only appears at midnight. Adam can ask him two questions as long as he starts them with Dear David. But if he tries to ask a third one, David will kill him again. Adam woke up from that dream feeling pretty shaken. He thought it was pretty weird to have a dream about the same thing. A few weeks went by, though, and nothing else that was weird happened. But then David came back. The dream starts the same way as the last. Adam's in bed. David's in the green rocking chair, staring at him. Whether it's a lucid dream or his subconscious just takes him there, Adam decides to ask the questions. So he says, dear David, how did you die? And David answers in a quiet mumble. He says, it was an accident in the store. Adam asked his second question. Dear David, what happened in the store? He says a shelf was pushed onto his head, so that's why he looks like this. Adam can't help himself. Before he realizes what he's doing, he asks, who pushed the shelf? David doesn't answer. That's when Adam knows he made a mistake. But before anything else happens, he wakes up. Over the next couple of days, Adam tried to find anything about David's death online. Nothing. He even googled different names, like Daniel, Dylan, or Devin. But they all came up empty. So he moved on with his life. And not long after, the apartment above Adams opened up. It was bigger, so he decided to move in. For a while, maybe a month or two, David didn't appear again. Adam wondered if he was rooted to the apartment downstairs. And then his cat started acting strange. Adam has two cats, and every night at exactly 12am Both cats got up from wherever they were sleeping, walked to the front door of the apartment and sat down side by side. They just stared at it, like there was something lurking right on the other side. This happened four nights in a row, until Adam finally decided to get up and check it out himself. He looked out the peephole and swore he could see something moving on the other side. But when he opened the door, the hallway was empty. His cats were still acting weird though, like something was there that Adam couldn't see. That's when his first wave of posts ended. That was everything that happened up to that point. Adam was convinced that David had found him again, and he promised to keep his followers updated with what happened next. It only took him two days to post again. At 12:09am on August 9, 2017, Adam posts his next update. It's a picture of one of his cats staring at the door again. Adam's holding a clock in his hand to show that it's just past midnight. He posts a video next. The cat's definitely interested in something on the other side of the door. It's sitting there meowing. Definitely focused on whatever's there. Adam's too freaked out to do anything other than look out the peephole and he swears he saw something. Eventually he feels brave enough to open the door. The hallway's empty, but he takes a picture just in case and there's a dark smudge by the stairs. You tell me if you see something, but Adam's convinced that it's not just a smudge or a trick of the light. He's so scared, he deadbolts the door. Adam is desperate to figure out what's going on, so he decides to use a sleeptalk app to see if there's any weird sounds during the night and he hears something. I feel like summer is when I notice the little time savers the most, and Instacart is definitely one of them for me. Instead of planning my day around a grocery run, I can just open the app, build my cart, and move on with my day. I use delivery via Instacart a lot for weekly essentials like fresh produce, snacks, and everything I need for quick meals. I love that I can be specific about what I want, and I'm still getting that level of quality. And when plans come up out of nowhere, it's easy to adjust. I can place an order and have what I need without rearranging everything. It just keeps things simple. It's honestly one less thing to think about, which I really appreciate. This time of year, Instacart brings convenience, quality and ease right to your door so you can focus on what matters most. Download the Instacart app now and get groceries just how you like. If you've ever wondered what diseases, medieval pee tests and cocktails have in common, you're in the right place. On our show, this Podcast Will Kill youl, we explore the wild world of diseases, their history biology and impact. Today, vaccines are in part a victim of their own success. They have been so effective in preventing disease and death that we take them for granted. New episodes drop every Tuesday on the Exactly Right network. Listen to this podcast will kill you on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or where you get your podcasts. Okay, so to recap, Adam Ellis, a comic artist living in New York, has been having recurring dreams about a dead boy named David, a child with a dented skull who sits in a rocking chair and watches him sleep. A girl in one of his dreams told Adam that he could ask David two questions but never a third. Adam asked three. But before David could get him, Adam woke up. He moved apartments. The dream stopped. Everything seemed fine until a couple of months later when his cat started sitting at the front door every night at midnight, staring at it like something was on the other side. Now Adam does something that changes the entire shape of this story. He stops being a passive narrator and starts becoming an investigator. After taking those pictures by the staircase, Adam is freaked out. He even decides to put a line of spirit salt in front of his door just in case it'll stop David from coming in. But his cats are still acting weird. So Adam decides to record the sounds in his apartment with the SleepTalk app. Every time it hears something, it makes a recording. And on the night of August 10, 2017, it records 33 different events. Now, a lot of them are totally normal, like passing cars on the street, the sort of things you'd expect to hear in New York City at night. But there are some that Adam can't explain. The first is a sort of snapping sound, followed by what sounds like someone taking a single step. It's weird because Adam says he didn't get out of bed. And then there's a recording with a weird electric sound, like a staticky buzz. And it's not like this is just background noise. It's the only clip with that sound. Directly after that, there's another snapping sound, followed by Adam groaning in his sleep. And what makes it even more chilling is that all of these happen between 2 and 3am it's obvious that something is going on there, but weird sounds and a blur by the stairs aren't enough. Adam needs more, so he decides to get a Polaroid camera. And this is where things get really weird. He starts taking pictures around his apartment. And like the SleepTalk app, everything is normal for the most part. The green rocking chair by the bed even makes an appearance. But one of them, one of the hallways, is wrong The Polaroid is completely black. Adam wonders if maybe it just didn't develop or something. But he opens a fresh pack and sees that undeveloped Polaroids start out white. Before he gets too freaked out, Adam wonders if maybe he'd just covered the lens with his finger or something. So he tries taking one like that for comparison. But when you look at the two side by side, you can see that there's still some light that bleeds through. Still, Adam's not jumping to any conclusions. So he steps back and takes a picture of the hallway from further back in his apartment. First with his phone, then again with the Polaroid. The phone one totally normal, well lit. You can see everything but the Polaroid. The room is the same, but the hallway is pitch black. It's terrifying, like there's some kind of void just outside of his door. And now Adam lets himself be scared. He's willing to try anything. So he tries burning sage to get rid of any evil spirits. He reports back the next day with four Sage did not work. If anything, it has the opposite effect. Instead of making David go away, it seems like it just made him mad. Because for the first time in months, Adam dreams about him again. This time his room is filled with smoke. Maybe a callback to the sage. But it's clear enough for Adam to see David sitting in that rocking chair. David looks a bit different this time. A bit smaller, maybe even shrunken. And they don't talk. No questions, just silence. David just sat there looking at him. Adam feels like that's a bad omen. And for the next few nights, his cats keep sitting at the door like they've been doing every night the past two weeks. The SleepTalk app keeps picking up sounds too. The same staticky sound at 3am Lasting for five minutes or so. Then a few days later, after that latest dream, Adam wakes up and the whole house is shaking, almost like an earthquake, even though there wasn't one in that area. Adam knows it sounds kind of ridiculous, but with everything combined, he can't shake the bad feeling that he has. And he doesn't think it's worth it to try moving again. He's pretty sure that David will just follow him wherever he goes. Soon things start to escalate. That night, Adam is feeling extra tired for some reason, so he goes to bed early. He dreams about David again, except they're not in Adam's room. David is dragging him by the arm through an abandoned warehouse. For some reason, Adam doesn't fight back. Maybe because he can't, or. Or it's just the logic of the dream. He's not sure, but that's not the creepy part. It's When Adam wakes up and takes a shower, he realizes that there's a bruise on his arm right where David had grabbed him. Again, Adam tries to rationalize it. Maybe he hurt himself the day before and it just manifested as that dream. But then he goes out to meet a friend for coffee that Saturday morning. On the way, he passes the warehouse where food carts go for repairs. Normally it's packed, especially on weekends. Not today, though. Now it's completely empty and abandoned, just like the warehouse he dreamt about. He can't help himself. He has to check it out. There's only one thing left in the warehouse, a single green chair. Thankfully, Adam gets out of there after that. Things keep escalating. His cats are still going to the door every night, but now it starts happening earlier and earlier, around 10pm instead of midnight. And then David finds a new way to communicate with through his phone. Adam starts getting these calls from an unknown number. Not that weird on its own, right? We all get spam calls, and at first that's what Adam thinks it is too. So he ignores them. But the person keeps calling. Adam figures that they'll stop calling if he just answers and says to leave him alone. But when he picks up, all he hears is stopped static, the same sound from his SleepTalk app. Adam keeps listening, hoping maybe it's a glitch that an automated message will play. But the sound keeps going for over a minute. And then it stops. There's silence. Except Adam can hear what sounds like faint breathing. He can barely hear it over the sound of his thudding heart. He's just about to hang up when he hears a quiet, small voice whisper. Hello. I feel like summer is when I notice the little time savers the most, and Instacart is definitely one of them for me. Instead of planning my day around a grocery run, I can just open the app, build my cart, and move on with my day. I use delivery via Instacart a lot for weekly essentials like fresh produce, snacks, and everything I need for quick meals. I love that I can be specific about what I want and I'm still getting that level of quality. And when plans come up out of nowhere, it's easy to adjust. I can place an order and have what I need without rearranging everything. It just keeps things simple. It's honestly one less thing to think about, which I really appreciate this time of year. Instacart brings convenience, quality and Ease right to your door so you can focus on what matters most. Download the Instacart app now and get groceries just how you like. Such an ordinary thing to walk home from high school. My name was Mickey Costanzo. Just 16. She didn't have far to go. Seemed perfectly safe. Until it wasn't. What happened to Mickey? I'm Keith Morrison and this is five Miles From Home, an all new podcast from Dateline. Search five miles from Home to start listening now. After hearing the voice say hello, Adam hangs up. He's so scared. He stays up all night watching TV so he won't fall asleep. It's been three weeks of this, and he can't take it much longer. The only hope he has is that he's taking a vacation to Japan in a few weeks, and maybe that'll be far enough to get rid of David. And maybe if he thinks Adam has left the apartment for good, the haunting will stop. As Adam gets ready for his trip, he buys a pet monitoring camera so he can keep an eye on his cats. He describes it as a nanny cam that connects to Wi Fi and runs 24. 7. It'll send a notification anytime there's any sound or movement. Before he leaves, Adam is out of the apartment for a night, so he decides to set up the camera so he can test it out. Like the SleepTalk app and the Polaroids, everything is normal for the most part. He sees his cats running around and playing like usual. But then around 11pm he gets a notification and there's nothing there. Until he realizes his chair, that green rocking chair, is moving back and forth in a completely empty room. And yes, the windows are closed and the AC wouldn't be strong enough to do that. About a half hour later, Adam gets another alert. This time, a turtle's shell hanging on the wall just falls down without anything hitting it. When he gets home, Adam puts the chair in the hallway, thinking maybe that'll finally make everything stop. Spoiler alert. It doesn't. The next week, as he goes over more camera footage, Adam realizes that there's weird stuff from the videos of his cats playing at night while he sleeps. Nothing seems out of the ordinary until one of his cats jumps over what seems like an invisible object. And this isn't typical behavior. His cat never does anything like that. The cat's doing other weird stuff, too, like sitting up on its hind legs on and off for hours at a time, almost like it was looking around for something. There's even a video of it batting at something in the air, and Adam says He never gets flies in the apartment. A few days after that, the dreams come back and they're even worse. In one of them, Adam rolls over in bed and comes face to face with a severed head with the bloody spine still attached. Adam yells, what happened to you? And the head just says it feels great. In other dreams, he sees dark figures staring at him through his window. Even though he lives on the second floor of his building. Now, with all of this going on, Adam decides to take a walk to the bodega and grab a snack. On his way there, he passes by that abandoned warehouse again. It's still closed up, but as he passes by on his way home, Adam hears a of bunch bump behind the door. Adam tells himself he should just go home, but he needs to see what's back there. There's a window, but it's too high up for him to look through. He can hold his phone up to it though. And he snaps a picture. There isn't much to it, just some old insulation piled onto a filing cabinet and a ripped up desk chair. But then Adam noticed something up in the right corner. It could have been part of the flash, but he swears that there's a shape to it. Almost like a smashed in head. Again, you can tell me if you see something, but if you look close enough, it's there. Two hard pits for eyes, the shape of a nose. And the top corner is missing, just like David. That's the last thing that happens before Adam leaves for his trip to Japan. Everything goes great. He's having a blast. People are watching his cats and nothing weird is happening. But on the last morning of his trip, while Adam is walking around, he comes across a strange, haunting statue in a park. It's this sort of cylinder with sculptures of different people. One of them is a woman holding some babies, and one of them has a dented head. After Adam gets home, everything seems okay. But then a week or so goes by and something weird starts happening with the electricity. First, a light bulb burns out in the hallway. And when Adam changes it, the report placement burns out too. Then one night, the backlight behind his TV flickers on and off, even though it's only supposed to work when the TV is on. The next morning, as Adam is getting ready for work, he hears what sounds like the quiet scratching on the other side of his front door. So he takes a picture through the peephole and again he thinks he sees something. It's another iffy one. The sort of thing where you might only be seeing something because you're looking for it, but you can sort of make it out the shape of a child with a dented head. A lot like that statue that Adam saw in Japan. Adam has a friend come over and help him cleanse the apartment, and it seems to work for about a week. And then he walked by the warehouse again. This time it was open, still empty, except for a hearse parked inside. This is not the place you just casually park your funeral car. It's been closed for two months. I can see why Adam finds it so unsettling. Still, this is New York, so strange things happen all the time. So Adam puts it out of his mind. But then, believe it or not, things get even weirder. Around 11pm, he goes to the fridge to grab a drink when he notices his cat staring out the window. It looks onto the business next door, and when Adam peeks out, he sees someone on the roof staring back at him. And Adam does try taking a picture of it. It's hard to make out again, but Adam is sure that it was David. Then, about four months since Adam first dreamt about David, he comes back. David is in a chair again, but this time he's in a recliner, since the good old rocking chair is gone. Like the first dream, David's staring at Adam and he can't move from sleep paralysis. Something is different this time, though. Adam can move his hands just a tiny bit. He manages to grab his phone and starts taking pictures of David as he gets out of the chair and moves towards the bed. Adam keeps taking pictures until he and David were face to face. David's mumbling something, but Adam can't tell what he's saying. David then starts crawling onto the bed, and that's when Adam wakes up. He grabs his phone and there are dozens of pictures on them, all pitch black except for one where you can see the outline of someone sitting on the recliner. After that, Adam starts hearing thumps on his ceiling at night. That's when he realizes there's a crawlspace in the hallway he'd never thought about. And it doesn't sound like an animal or something. One night he sees a small. One night he hears a small clink and something rolling. A few nights later, he hears a crash and then another one. It happens like 15 times. Then Adam hears what sounds like a footstep in the hallway. Somehow he manages to go to sleep. But the next morning on his way out, he sees a pile of dirt directly under the hatch. Adam looks up and it seems like something's poking out from the hatch. He manages to get a pole and pop the hatch open and a small leather shoe falls out. Adam texts his landlord and asks him to go up there. He says there's nothing in the crawlspace except except for a marble, the kind that would clink and make a rolling sound if you dropped it. After that, Adam comes down with some kind of illness. He's not sleeping well, he's dizzy. And one night in December, he wakes up with the feeling that he's being watched. The feeling that he gets when David is around. The next night, it happens again. Adam wants to get a good look at what's going on, but the pet cam can't get an angle of the whole room. So he gets a time lapse camera and takes a picture every minute. The first hundred or so are normal, but then David shows up and this time there's no missing him. He keeps moving closer to Adam until he's standing on the bed. After that, he disappears. Except for the last picture. If you're listening on audio, it's just the top corner of his head, the intact side. You can see some stringy hair and a scarred ear. This is right before the holiday. So Adam takes this as his cue to go see his family in Montana. The second he gets there, he feels better. It seems like David didn't follow him there. Adam decides maybe he should look for another apartment after all. Maybe getting some distance, then just going to the unit upstairs will do the trick. That's when he sees weird footprints in the snow. Now, I'm no biologist, but this does not look like an animal to me. Adam doesn't think so either. These are human footprints. Small ones that disappeared into a ditch on the side of his family's property. When Adam gets back to his apartment after Christmas, he can still feel David there. He dreams that the little boy is hovering over his bed at night. Then he plummets down and when Adam wakes up, he has the wind knocked out of him. And sure enough, his time lapse camera caught it. Adam's okay though. And after that, it stops. The dreams go away. Adam can sleep again. Sure, sometimes he'll lose track of time, but overall he's doing a lot better. So he decides to get brunch with a friend in January 2018. They take a selfie together and it looks completely normal. But when Adam adds it to his story, it's distorted. He's distorted like the right side of his face is damaged. And that's where it ends. There's a few more strange tweets after that where Adam isn't writing things as neatly as he usually does. But there's no more updates about David. It's such an abrupt end to this long saga and with no resolution that people can't help to wonder what it was all for. The thread went viral, but that's a lot of work to do for that many months. And if it was all made up, you'd think there would be more. More of a resolution. So did Adam get bored and call it quits, or was it actually real? Let's lay out all the possibilities. Option one. It was all true. Adam Ellis was genuinely haunted by the spirit of a dead child named David. The dreams, the sleep paralysis, the moving chair, the Polaroids, all of it was real. And Adam documented it because he didn't know what else to do. This is the option that Adam himself, himself never explicitly confirmed, but also never denied. He let the ambiguity hang there. And for a lot of his followers, that ambiguity was the confirmation. Because a person making it up would eventually break character, right? They'd slip. They'd laugh about it. Adam never did. Option two is that it was performance art, designed to exploit the unique properties of Twitter to create a new kind of horror experience. Experience. If this is the case, Adam Ellis is genuinely one of the most innovative horror storytellers of the last decade. He not only wrote a scary story, he built a world that his audience lived inside for months. He understood that horror is more effective when the audience is doing the investigating, not just watching someone else do it. And he did get something out of it. Dear David was turned into a movie in 2023 by Lionsgate and Bo Buzzfeed Studios, where Adam worked. So there's something to be said about committing to the bit. Which brings us to option three. And this is the one that interests me the most, that it's somewhere between reality and fiction. Maybe Adam really did have this creepy dream. Maybe his cats really did sit at the door. Maybe a chair really did seem to move in the pet cam video. And maybe once those real moments of everyday eeriness started attracting attention, Adam leaned into it. Not because he was lying, but because he was doing what storytellers have always taking something real and turning it into something more. And you know what that third option is? The one that tracks with how most ghost stories work. Think about it. Every campfire tale, every haunted house experience, every family legend, they all start with something real. A sound in the attic, a door that won't stay closed, A feeling you got walking into a room. And then the story grows. Details get added. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, and before you know it, you can't remember where the truth ends and the story begins. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about Dear David? Do you believe Adam Ellis? Or do you think it was an elaborate performance? And have you ever experienced something in your own apartment that you just couldn't explain? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. 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. 1, 2 1, 2, 3, 4 Give me a break, give me a break Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar Gimme a break, give me a break Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar the chocolate crispy taste gonna make your day and wherever you go you hear the people say Give me a break, give me a break Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar have a break, have a Kit Kat. On a quiet Saturday morning, five women walked into Elaine Bryant store and never came home. The man responsible for their deaths was heard and even described by the lone survivor. But despite nearly being caught, he vanished into thin air. In the years since, new technology, new investigators, and new questions have changed what's possible. But the families are still waiting for answers. The evidence is still there, and this case isn't cold. It's unfinished. Listen to Counterclock Season eight wherever you get your podcasts.