← Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong
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Hi, it's Heidi. Before today's episode of Twisted Tales, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A and E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is crime house. A basement apartment with no windows and no way to tell how long you've been there. A phone call from your best friend with nothing behind her voice. An email that stops in the middle of a sentence seen with your own eyes. Don't trust them. They this isn't a story about a monster in the dark. It's about every screen, every speaker, every voice on the other end of a line you've ever trusted to tell you the truth. Today I'm telling you the story of a solitary man who started to wonder if anyone else out there was still real and what he did to be sure. 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. Crime House exists because of listeners like you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free. Subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crime houseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap. Try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. We're also on YouTube with full video episodes. Just search and subscribe to Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong so you can watch the horror come to life. Today's story is all about the famous creepypasta psychosis. It's about isolation, paranoia, and the gap between what you can prove and what you have to take on faith. There's a reason that people have been passing this story around for over a decade and stick with me because the ending is one of the best in the entire genre.
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Join now for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. Play Chumba Casino today. No purchase necessary. VGW Group void board prohibited by law 21 TNCs apply before we get started, a quick heads up. This episode deals with mental illness and self harm. So so please watch and listen with care. This is one of those stories where the most terrifying thing isn't a creature, it's a thought. One you can't unthink once it's in your head. I want you to play a little game with me as we go. Keep track of one thing and one thing only. Has this man actually seen another living person with his own two eyes? Because by the end, that question is going to matter more than anything else. So this story comes to us from a writer named Matt Demerski. And it showed up online back in November of 2010, which in creepypasta years, basically makes it ancient. This is one of the early ones from back when the Internet was still figuring out what a creepypasta even was. And here's the thing that I think makes it even more effective now than it did back then. In 2010, the idea the center of this story was a little theoretical, maybe a little simple sci fi. But today we live inside of it. Chances are, most of the people that you talked to this week, it was through a screen, a text bubble, a voice coming out of a speaker, maybe a face on a video call. We take more of reality on faith than any humans who have ever lived. Psychosis figured that out years before the rest of us caught up. It's written like a journal. Pages from a guy trying to write down exactly what's happening to him because he's afraid that if he doesn't get it on paper, he'll lose touch with reality. So let's get inside of his head. Our narrator is a young programmer. Let's call him John because that's the name that he gives later. John lives in the cheapest apartment that he could find, which turned out to be a basement unit, the only one in his building. It's tiny and cramped and there's no windows. And for a guy like John, sitting in front of his computer all the time, day and night don't really exist. There's no morning light, no evening dusk, just the same flat artificial glow of his monitor, hour after hour, while the world above quietly goes on without him. When the story starts, he's a few days into one of those programming binges where you forget to be a person where you look up and realize you haven't showered, you've been eating whatever is left in the fridge, and the last conversation that you had was with yourself. He's been heads down on a project alone for a while now, and that's when the first little wrongness creeps in. The people he usually talks to online while he works, they've gone quiet, everyone's set to idle, or they never locked on at all. His instant messages sit there unanswered. The last email he got from anyone was a friend saying that he'd write back when he got home from the store. That was yesterday and there's been nothing since. Now, on its own, it's not that weird. People get busy. But John's been alone in a windowless room for two days and the silence is starting to get to him. So he decides to do the healthy thing. He's going to go outside and get a signal. His cell reception is garbage in the basement and he just wants to hear another human being's voice. He slowly opens his apartment door and he notices that for a reason that he can't explain, he's afraid. Just a little. It's a small cold knot of apprehension that was already sitting in his chest before he even reached for the handle. John figures that it's just because he hasn't gone out for a couple of days. So he steps into the dingy gray basement hallway. At one end, a heavy metal door to the building's furnace room is locked. Next to it, there's two old soda machines humming away in the dark. Machines he's pretty sure nobody even knows are down there. The one time he bought a soda from them, it was expired by two years. John walked towards the stairs and something inside him said not to make a sound. For some reason he doesn't want to break the hum of those machines. He just doesn't. He even notes how strange that impulse is. Tiptoeing along, he climbs the stairs to the basement's front door, a big heavy thing with a little square window, and he looks out and he gets a jolt. It's the middle of the night. John thought that it was lunchtime. He even changed his shirt, figured he'd run into somebody. But outside that window the street is dark and empty. The traffic light at the far intersection is blinking yellow. Nothing's moving except a few skinny sidewalk trees swaying in the wind. He decides he doesn't actually want to go out there, but there's enough of a signal at the door for him to make A call. So John hits Speak speed dial for his best friend, a girl named Amy. It rings once, then it just stops. Dead silence on the line for a solid 20 minutes. He hangs up, confused. Full bars. He goes to try again, and the phone rings in his hand. He answers, says hello. And there's a pause. Then a guy's voice. Young, college, aged, like him. Hey, who's this? John, he says. Oh, sorry. Wrong number. The caller hangs up. It's weird. John checks the number in his call log and he doesn't recognize the number. Weird. But before he can even think about it, the phone rings again. Different unknown number. This time he answers, but he stays quiet. And then John. It's Amy. He's so relieved to hear her that he could cry. She explains that she's at a party on 7th Street. Her phone died the second that he called her, so she grabbed somebody else's to call him back. Amy tells him to come to the party. John says no. He doesn't feel like wandering around looking for someplace in the middle of the night. He'll just stay in and finish up his work. Amy laughs and says she'll come get him. And then there's this little hitch in the conversation. She asks if his building is close to 7th Street. He teases her, you know where I live. And she goes, oh, of course. A beat too fast. Then she says she's gotta go. Wishes him good luck on the work and bye. John lowers the phone, and the silence of that empty stairwell comes rushing back in. He goes back to his room, a little spooked, and writes it all down. Putting it onto paper actually calms him. It sorts the noise into plain facts. It's late. He got a wrong number. Amy's phone died and she called back. Nothing's wrong. Except. As he's writing, it hits him. There was something off about that call. She said she was at a party, but the whole time he didn't hear anything behind her. No music, no crowd, no voices. And then there's an even worse thought. The one that he can't shake. He didn't hear the wind outside that front door. The wind was constant. That low, cold, late night rush through all those tree leaves. If Amy had stepped outside of a party to make a call, he would have heard it. But he didn't. It was just her voice, floating in a perfect dead void. He needs to go check if the wind is still blowing. Okay, so right away, the scary thing about this first part isn't a tangible thing. It's an absence. No reply to the messages. No party sounds, no wind. The horror comes from everything that should be there and isn't. A monster you can fight. But how do you fight silence in that wrong number call, the guy asks, who's this? John says his name and the guy hangs up. And then 30 seconds later, Amy calls him from a different, strange number and knows exactly who she's talking to. On a first read, it's nothing. But if you think about it, John just handed his name to a stranger and the next voice on the line already knows it. Which, yes, his friend would know. But what if it wasn't really her? And honestly, if you've ever spent a long weekend completely alone, you know this exact feeling where you haven't said a word out loud in two days and your own apartment starts feeling slightly unfamiliar. All of a sudden, perfectly normal things might take on a sinister edge. Most of the time, it's just your mind playing tricks on you. But in this case, there's a lot more going on.
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Okay, so when we left John, he was about to run upstairs to make sure the wind was really blowing like he remembered. But he doesn't finish writing that night before he falls asleep. The next entry. He's feeling ridiculous about the whole thing. Hindsight's 20 20, and last night's fear is starting to feel a little ridiculous. He's starting to check his email, shave, shower, and finally get outside in the sun. Then he writes, wait, I think I heard something. It's thunder. John goes up to the front door and there's a wall of rain. It's sheeting down the glass so hard he can't see anything but the blurred, warped shapes moving in the water. At least there's enough gray light coming through that he knows it's daytime now and he doesn't want to go back to his room. Instead, he wanders up past the first floor, then the second, all the way to the third, the building's top floor. The hallway up there is lined with old wooden doors, maybe 10 of them painted blue long, long time ago. They're all shut. And standing in that dim hall listening to the rain, John gets this strange flicker of an image. The doors stop looking like doors for a second. They look like monoliths, big silent stone slabs set up by some ancient forgotten people to guard something. Lighting flashes and he swears the old blue wood looks like rough gray stone. John laughs it off, but the lighting flash makes him think there must be a window up there. He remembers there's an alcove halfway down the hall with a big thin pane of glass. He walks over, reaches out to slide it open so he can finally look down at the street, maybe see another human being down there. And he stops because he has a sudden, total, bone deep certainty that if he opens that window, he's going to see something on the other side that he can't handle seeing, so he doesn't open it. Instead, he comes up with a plan. John is a programmer. He's got a webcam, so he decides he's going to set up surveillance. He grabs the webcam from his room and hides it in the dark gap between the two soda machines in the basement hallway. Then he runs the cable along the wall and under his own apartment door, then tapes it down with black duct tape so it blends into the baseboard. Now he can sit in his room and watch a live feed of the hallway and the stairwell. If anything's out there, he'll see it coming. He gets it set up and starts watching the feed. And? Nothing. The hallway's empty. Like always. John's almost disappointed. He just wishes he could see the building's front door itself. Then something pops up online. It's a friend. And John, desperate for a human face, asks to video chat. He digs out a second, older webcam from his closet to do it, and the conversation's fine. It feels good to see a face. But afterwards, John can't shake how vague it was. He can't remember a single specific thing that his friend said. He didn't mention any names, places, or events. Nothing identifiable in any way. But the friend did ask one thing before they hung up. Hey, what's your email again? Let's keep in touch. John gives it to him a few minutes later. Ding. New email. It's from Amy. She wants to meet up for dinner at the place we usually go. And let me tell you, John is thrilled. He's been eating sad fridge scraps for days, and now there's pizza and a chance to see his best friend. He decides he's gonna destroy his journal once he gets home and clears his head. John gets up and heads out the door and notices he has another new email. So he reads it first, and thank God he does. It's from a friend he hasn't heard from in ages.
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And.
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And it wasn't sent just to him. It was sent to a huge list of addresses. Like the guy blasted it to every single email that he had. No subject line. And the body is one single unfinished line. Seen with your own eyes. Don't trust them. They. That's it. It just stops. Cut off mid sentence. Like whatever the guy was typing, he just didn't get to finish. John sits there reading it over and over and over, seen with your own eyes. And the whole structure of the last few days suddenly takes on new meaning because he starts going back through everything that's happened. And he realizes something that turns his blood to ice. This entire time, he hasn't seen a single other human being with his own eyes or talked to anyone face to face. And worse, not one piece of information has come to him that he didn't hand over. First, the wrong number guy got his name from him. He messaged that vague friend first, before they ever asked him for his email. The first message arrived minutes later, after he gave out the address and that phone call with Amy. He told her out loud that he lived within a half hour walk of 7th Street. He told them where he is. John panics. He runs around the apartment holding his phone to every corner, hunting for a signal, and finally finds one bar near the bathroom ceiling and texts everyone in his contacts. Trying to sound normal. He just writes, you seen anyone face to face lately? He doesn't care if he embarrasses himself anymore. He just needs one real reply. But no one writes back to him. John tapes the phone to the bathroom ceiling so it'll keep the signal. Then collapses from exhaustion. The next day, he wakes up to the phone ringing. It's Amy, and she is so relieved to reach him. She's been trying to get hold of him for ages. She's worried sick and she's coming over right now. And yes, she knows where he lives. Without him telling her. John feels like an idiot. Of course it's Amy. He can't help but feel embarrassed. He's glad nobody else responded to his frantic messages. He tells himself everything he's experienced can be explained. Of course, there was nobody outside when he went up in the middle of the night. And who would go out in a giant rainstorm? Plus, John found an old TV in his closet and has it set up. Having it on the background is helping him a lot. It's a reminder that yes, the outside world does exist. While he waits for Amy, he thinks about the day they met. It was years ago. A warm summer afternoon. The two of them way too old to be hanging around a playground, just talking and doing nothing for hours. He's never told anyone about that day. Not out of embarrassment, though. It's just a private, quiet, almost sacred kind of nostalgia. It's his. There's a knock at the door and immediately something is wrong. John looks at the hidden soda machine camera feed and he can't see Amy. He figures it's a bad angle, like the front door he could never see. He calls through the door, kind of joking. Hey, full disclosure. I hid a camera between the soda machines and on the live feed he watches Amy walk over to the little camera, look right down to the lens and smile and wave. Hey, she says. Open the door, John. But he hesitates because how can he be sure that it's really her? So he says, humor me. Tell me one thing that you know about us. Just one. Prove you're you. She gives the camera a look, thinks for a second, and then she says into the mic, she brings up the playground, the day they met, when they were both way too old to be there, and John just exhales. It's a memory that he never told another living soul, that exists nowhere in the world except inside of him and Amy's heads. If something were really out there wearing her face to trick him, there would be no possible way it would know about that day. He laughs, says, okay, okay, I'll explain everything. Be right there. He goes and fixes his hair. He walks to the door. He puts his hand on the knob, takes one last look at the trashed apartment. His eyes land on the old webcam, the second one that he used for the vague empty video chat with his friend. It's lying on its side on the floor where he tossed it. Its lens is pointed at the table, the table where his journal is sitting. Open the journal where just moments ago he wrote down in detail the story of the day he met Amy at the playground. It knew if something could see through that camera, it didn't have to guess his most private memory. It just had to read it. He'd written the answer down himself and left it lying in frame, the one thing in the entire world he was sure that they couldn't know. He handed it over exactly like he handed over everything else. He does not open the door. John screams. He stomps the old webcam to pieces on the floor. The floor shakes. The doorknob turns and he doesn't hear Amy's voice on the other side. Was the heavy basement door just too thick? Or was Amy never really out there at all? He saw her on the screen. He heard her through the speakers. But every bit of that came through a wire. How can he know? He starts dragging everything he owns across the room and piling it against the front door. The playground. That is one of the most devastating twists I've ever read, and here's why it gets to me. It takes the single most precious, private thing this lonely man has, the memory that he's been holding onto like a candle in the dark, and it reveals that the monster was reading it over his shoulder the whole time. And step back and look at where the fear is coming from. John never receives anything he didn't give first his name, his location, his email, and finally, his most sacred memory, which he literally wrote down and left pointed at a camera. The threat doesn't know him, it reflects him. Here's the part that I know makes the story scarier now than it was in 2010. We all live exactly like John now. There's a camera and a microphone within arm's reach of you right this second, probably several the webcam was supposed to be his connection to other people, and it became the thing that destroyed his most intimate secret. Think about how much of your inner life is sitting in front of the lens right now and who might be watching.
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the next entry John doesn't even know what day it is anymore. He thinks it's a Friday for reference. The last one was from Tuesday and since then he's destroyed everything electronic that he owns, even smashed his computer to pieces. John is a programmer. He knows what a network can do. Every file, every byte, anything connected to anything could have been accessed or worse, altered. He can't trust a Single device in that room. He's pacing, swinging back and forth between two stories he's telling himself. One, I am a perfectly sane person going through a complete mental collapse. Or two, the reason nothing's gotten to me yet is that I keep almost slipping up and then catching myself. Maybe whatever's out there got everyone else first. Maybe I'm one of the last real people left. And if that's the case, there's one fact that gives John a sliver of it. Can't get in. It knocked. It rattled the knob. But it never got through any doors. Not the front door, not his door, not that window on the third floor he never opened. And that image of the upstairs door comes back to him. The silent monoliths, the guardians. Maybe a threat like this just can't cross a threshold. Or maybe it's just not strong enough to break through. But if it does, John wonders what it wants with him. After all, it doesn't have to do anything to kill him. It could just wait until he starves. No, it wants him to come outside for a specific reason. But what was it? There's a knock, but this time he hears voices, real ones, through the door. He calls back that he needs a minute to think and he'll come out. John wonders if they could be faking it somehow. Maybe the voices are just coming through the speakers. But supposedly there are people out, Amy. Two police officers and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist does the talking. John actually likes his voice. Older, calm, authoritative, but kind. It's the voice of a man who's going to make all of this make sense. And he does. The psychiatrist tells John that he has something called cyberpsychosis and that John is not alone. He's one of the thousands of people across the country having the exact same breakdown all at once. The doctor says it started with a single suggestive email that got through somehow and spread. John doesn't really know what he means by that. Maybe it's just this strange shared delusion, somehow spreading through the country without anyone communicating. But it makes John suspicious.
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He.
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It does explain a lot, though. That cutoff email John got. It was a descendant of the original email, and it was enough to infect John's mind. And he might have spread it himself with those panicked texts and messages. Think about it. He sent the words, you seen anyone? Face to face lately to everyone that he knows. Somebody out there could be reading that right now and starting to come apart. And then the psychiatrist says the thing that should set John free. Free. He says. People like you are intelligent and that's the problem. You're so good at spotting patterns that you can find them where they aren't. You connect dots that were never connected. In a fast, noisy, simulated world, a sharp mind can send itself right off a cliff. John has to admit it's a perfect explanation. It accounts for every single thing that's happened. The silent calls, the echoing information, the camera, all of it. He has every reason in the world to let the fear go, open the door, and walk back into his life. And that, he writes, is exactly why he won't. Because it's too perfect. If something out there were smart enough to build this whole trap, the final, most elegant move would be to hand him a flawless explanation for why the trap isn't real. A story so reasonable that any sane person would believe it. The cure and the trap would look identical. And then his mind goes one step further. John's been telling himself the door is safe because the danger comes through. Wires, cameras, speakers, phones, signals. But what is a camera? It takes light and turns that light into electrical signals. And what does his eye do? It takes light and turns it into electrical signals sent down a nerve into his brain. A camera and an eye are the same machine. So if the thing can fake a camera feed, it can fake what his eyes see, too. Opening the door wouldn't prove anything. Seeing Amy wouldn't prove anything. His eyes are just two more screens that he can't trust. And that cutoff email comes screaming back at him in a whole new light. Seen with your own eyes. Don't trust them. They. Was that telling him to trust his eyes? Or was it a warning about them? He can't tell. He has to be sure. By the next entry, John has done something to make certain that what he sees can never deceive him again. He doesn't describe it. He just mentions, almost calmly, that the bandages over his eyes feel like a part of him now and that the pain is gone. He's in a padded cell. John writes from inside the dark, knowing that it'll only be a matter of time until his muscle memory fades and he can't do it legibly anymore. He tells us how it is now. Something brings him food and water. It wears the face of a kind nurse. Then an indifferent doctor. He thinks it knows his hearing has sharpened because it stages little conversations out in the hallway for him to overhear. One nurse talking about a baby on the way. A doctor who just lost his wife in a car accident. None of it is real. None of it gets to him. Except for her the worst thing it does is come to him as Amy. And the recreation is flawless. It sounds exactly like her. It even produces tears and makes him feel them warm on a perfect, lifelike cheek. And in the beginning, it told him everything he ever wanted to hear. That she loved him, that she'd always loved him. That she didn't understand why he would do this to himself. That they could still have a whole life together if he would just stop insisting he was being deceived. It needed him to believe that she was real. And he almost did. He says that he doubted himself for the longest time, but in the end, it was all too perfect, too flawless, Too real. So he held the line. And the fake Amy came every day, then every week. And then, finally, she stopped coming at all. But John doesn't think it's given up. He thinks that the waiting game is just another move. So he's made his decision. There in the dark, rocking against the padded wall. He will resist for the rest of his life, if he has to. Because if this thing needs him to fall for it, then maybe his refusal is the one thing standing in its way. Maybe the real Amy is still, still out there somewhere, kept alive by nothing but his will not to break. He will never give in. He will never believe it. He is, he writes, a hero. And then the story has one final passage. It cuts away from John, and for the first time, we're outside of his head. We're with the Doctor, the real one, in the hallway, holding the pages John scribbled, written by a man who can't see his own handwriting. The Doctor reads about this delusional man's vow to resist forever, and he wants to smile at it, this stubborn, broken testament to the human will to survive. He wants to lean in and whisper a word of encouragement to him. More than anything, he wants to scream. But he can't because of the thin nerve filaments wound around his head and threaded down into his eyes. His body walks into the cell like a puppet on strings, and it tells the patient one more time in a warm and gentle, reasonable voice, that he's wrong, that there's nobody trying to deceive him. That ending is tough. First it hands you with the comforting version. Oh, okay. He's mentally ill. That this is a tragedy about psychosis and the monster was never real. And the instant that you think it over, you get the Doctor with the wires in his eyes. John was right the whole time. And here's the horror that I cannot stop thinking about in this world. Sanity and survival. Don't go hand in hand. To be cured, to be normal, to trust your eyes, to open the door is to be taken. John is the only one who refused, and his reward is to be the last free mind on earth. Blind, alone in a padded room, certain that he's a hero and completely unable to ever prove it to anyone, including himself. If you ask me, what makes this story so creepy isn't just John's increased paranoia. It's that his inability to trust his eyes is a parallel of an actual psychiatric phenomenon called Capgras delusion, where a person becomes convinced that someone they love has been secretly swapped for an identical imposter. The face is right, the voice is right, the memories are right, and the person is still deep down certain that it's not really them. This story takes that exact terror and puts it into a world of webcams and phone calls and asks the oldest question in philosophy along the way. How do you actually know reality is real? How much of your world do you take in every single day, purely on faith? John's nightmare was that everything reaching him came through a screen, a speaker, a wire, and he couldn't verify a single bit of it. Now think about your week. Think about how many of the people in your life you saw. Only as a face on a video call or a voice on a phone or a name in a text bubble. Can you be sure they're who they say they are? Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. I'd love to hear from you. Have you ever been alone long enough that the world started to feel like just a little bit unreal? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. And if you want to support Twisted Tales and get episodes a day early and ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap. Try free at the top of the Twisted Tales show page. And be sure to follow Twisted Tales so we can keep building this community together. 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. Hi, it's Heidi. Before today's episode of Twisted Tales, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A and E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime scene series, the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.