← Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong
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- [00:02]
Heidi Wong
Hi listeners. Exciting news Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that build America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for new episodes every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page.
- [00:48]
Carter Roy
This is crime house.
- [00:55]
Heidi Wong
A hole in the wall of a cave no bigger than a fist. A breeze blowing from somewhere no one has ever been. Weeks of obsessive work to break through only to discover whatever's on the other side has been waiting. And it's going to follow you out. 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 Twitter 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. 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 I'm telling you the story of Ted the Caver. If you were on the Internet in the early 2000s, there's a chance you stumbled across this one. A bare bones website with photographs and journal entries from a man documenting his attempt to break through a narrow passage deep inside of a cave. It started like a guy posting about his hobby online. It ended as one of the most disturbing things ever posted online. And it was so detailed that for a long time a lot of people thought it was real. What do you get when you combine bingo style bonuses and slots? DraftKings Casino is the exclusive place to play Kushingo slots. New casino players play $5 and get 1000 Flex spins. Claim 50 spins a day for 20 days on your choice of over 100 slots, including the exclusive Kosingo Collection. Download the DraftKings casino app and sign up with code Twisted to claim your flex spins and experience Kachingo the feature. You can't play anywhere else. The crown is yours. In partnership with DraftKings Casino Gambling Problem call 1-800-GAMBLER in Connecticut. Help is available for problem gambling. Call 888-789-7777 or visit ccpg.org Please play responsibly. 21 physically present in Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia only void in Ontario eligibility restrictions apply. Non withdrawable spins issued as 50 spins per day for 20 days. Valid and expire each day after 24 hours. See terms@casino.draftkings.com Promos ends July 22 at 11:59pm Eastern Time yo, it's Jey Uso
- [03:38]
Carter Roy
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Heidi Wong
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Carter Roy
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Heidi Wong
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- [04:04]
Heidi Wong
we're prohibited by law cts and zs21 sponsored by chumba casino so before I get into this, I need to set the stage a little, because Ted the Caver is old, at least in terms of Internet horror. We're talking early 2001. This predates 4chan, Reddit and YouTube by four years. Ted the Caver essentially invented creepypastas, a personal account presented as real, updated over time with photographic evidence. If Ben Drowned was the story that perfected the multimedia creepypasta, Ted the Caver was the prototype, and it's still one of the scariest things I've ever read. Not because of what's in the cave, although that's terrifying, but because of how it makes you feel. The claustrophobia, the slow build, the sense that you are crawling into a place that does not want you there. Fair warning, if you have any issues with tight spaces, this one is going to test you. It's December 30, 2000. A recreational caver who identifies himself only as Ted decides to squeeze through one last trip before the New Year with his caving partner, a guy he calls Bea. Their destination is a place Ted calls Mystery Cave. That's not his real name, though. Ted refuses to reveal the actual location to anyone for any reason. He says he won't be held responsible for anyone's life, but his own. So already we know we're getting into something serious. Now, Mystery Cave itself isn't anything special. It's pretty popular and easy to get to, and people haven't treated it very well. Beer cans litter the upper chambers. Graffiti cover the walls. Normally, Ted wouldn't waste his time here, but he and Bee haven't been caving in a while. And plus, he has another reason he wants to go there. Because deep in Mystery Cave, near the very bottom, there's something Ted has always noticed but never investigated. A small hole in the wall, about the size of a fist. And blowing out of it, there's a steady breeze. Now, there's a saying among cavers. If it blows, it goes. Meaning if a passage has a good flow of air coming through it, it probably leads somewhere. The air has to be coming from somewhere, right? And if it's flowing through a hole this small, whatever's on the other side could be a completely unexplored section of the cave. For a caver, that's the holy grail. When they get there, Ted kneels down beneath a rock overhang and shines a flashlight into the hole. The wall around it is only 3 to 5 inches thick. On the other side, he can see a tight crawl space that extends back about 10 to 12ft before it appears to open into something much larger. He and Bee sit in the darkness, listening to the wind howling through the passage. It makes a low, eerie sound. They can also hear a faint rumbling from time to time, but they chalk that up to the trucks driving on a nearby highway vibrating through the rock. They decide they want to check it out, so they hatch a bring in equipment to drill into the rock, hammer it apart, and widen the hole until they can squeeze through. Ted figures it'll take maybe four hours of work. He names the passage Floyd's Tomb, after Floyd Collins, a caver from the 1920s who got stuck in a tight crawlspace underneath and died there. It was meant to be a darkly humorous tribute. In hindsight, it was something closer to a prophecy. In the end, it takes a lot longer than a few hours to get through. They work in shifts. One drills and hammers while the other lies in the darkness on a rope bag, eating, drinking, or sleeping. The only light is the headlamp of whoever's working. They come back again and again over a couple of weeks, burning through drill batteries and masonry bits. As they work, something starts nagging at both of them. The wind. It's getting louder. And so is the rumbling. It's especially weird because it couldn't be coming from the trucks. They can hear the rumbling in the middle of the night when the roads are empty and it seems to emanate from deep within the passage, not from above it. Bea asks some veteran caver friends about it. They think it might be the sound of underground water, maybe a waterfall somewhere in the unexplored cave. But they can't explain why the sound comes and goes. It's weird, but exciting. Just another reason to get through that hole. Then, a few weeks later, on a trip in February 2001, Ted and Bea bring along Bea's dog, a jack ruster terrier named Whip. The plan is to see if she can fit through the hole and see how far she'll go. No, literally, now that a dog is involved and the dog is so freaking cute, the stakes are much higher. We need to save Whip, no matter what it takes. Ted and Bea aren't worried about her, though. She goes caving with them all the time and never runs off. They even have a special harness for her. But the moment they reach the deeper sections of the cave, something changes. As they approach the work site, Whip stops walking. The hair on her back stands straight up. And by the time they're within 20ft of the hole, she's cowering on the ground, whimpering, tail between her legs. Whip refuses to move. She just lies there on a rope bag, shivering stiff, staring at the hole. She won't take her eyes off of it, and Ted and Bee aren't about to force her through. So they decide to keep working on the hole. While one of them works, the other will stay a bit further back with Whip. They go at it for a while, burning through four batteries on their drill. And then, while Bea is working, he suddenly stops and looks into the hole. Ted is almost asleep on the rope bag, but he sees the expression on Bea's face in the dim glow of the work light. He said he just heard something. A grinding sound like rock sliding against rock coming from inside the passage. Ted says it's probably just his ears ringing from the drill, but Beast swears that's not it. Neither of them can explain it, though, and neither of them is willing to stop working. When they finally take a break, they notice something else. The breeze has completely stopped the rumbling, too. It's as if the cave itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what they'll do. Ted and Be decide to keep going, and it's a decision they'll come to regret. Whip's reaction, honestly, to me, is one of the most scary parts right now, because that is not how an animal's just smelling a raccoon would react. That's an animal sensing something that has every instinct she has telling her to get away from. And the fact that Ted and Bee just noted it and kept working, that's the first sign that their obsession has overridden their common sense. That is the point in which I would leave personally. I mean, I wouldn't go caving anyways. But if I found myself in a cave with my puppy, with my hypothetical puppy, and the puppy was starting to warn me, I would take that warning 100%. 100%. I feel like I would trust my puppy more than I trust my curiosity to see the other side. You know, what I love about this part of the story is the contrast between the mundane and the inexplicable. The work itself is so boring, so physical, so tediously real. Drill a hole, hammer a pin, break off a fingernail sized chip of a rock, repeat for hours. That when something strange happens, your brain wants to file it under cave stuff. Rumbling trucks, grinding noises, ringing ears, wind stopping weather. The story earns its horror by being so relentless, painfully normal, that the abnormal slides right past your defenses. And that line that Ted writes in his journal that in retrospect he can't believe how casual they were being about everything happening in the cave. That's such a devastating piece of self awareness. He's telling you from the future that everything you're reading right now is a mistake. That every time they shrugged something off and kept drilling, they were literally digging themselves deeper into something that they didn't understand. And they didn't stop because the hole was so close to being big enough. There's a psychological concept called the sunk cost fallacy. The idea that the more you've invested in something, the harder it is to walk away. Even when all of the signs tell you to. Ted and Bea have spent weeks hauling equipment into this cave, destroying their bodies, burning through batteries. They're not going to stop because of weird noises and a nervous dog. But that's what makes the story so real. It's not that they're stupid. It's that they're human. They have invested too much to quit. But the dog knows. The dog always knows.
- [12:46]
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- [13:21]
Carter Roy
Hi listeners, It's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of this show's page. Celebrate America's 250th with Dish. For a limited time, get an extra $250 off when you sign up. Call 888-add-direct or visit dish.com today and use code DISH250 to claim your $250 savings. That's 888 Add Dish. Offer ends August 12th. Terms apply.
- [14:42]
Heidi Wong
It's March 2001, about two weeks since Ted and Bea started working on the Hole, and a few weeks after that trip with Whip, they're on their way back to the Mystery cave. But something has shifted. Ted writes that the mood on the drive out is more subdued than usual. They're not brainstorming ways to see speed up the work anymore. They're trying to come up with rational explanations for the things they've experienced. And neither of them has talked to anyone about their last trip, which is a reversal. Normally, they couldn't wait to tell their friends and family about their progress, but they've worked too hard to stop now. And when Ted and Bea get down to the work site, they realize the breeze and the rumbling are there again. Ted is feeling optimistic. They've gotten the opening big enough to put their hammer in and take a picture of Floyd's tomb. He thinks today might be the day they can finally squeeze through themselves. Their progress that day is still slow, but steady. Then, midway through their fourth battery, something happens that changes everything. Ted's kneeling at the passage, drilling into the rock, earplugs in safety, glasses on, lost in the rhythm of the work. Suddenly over the scream of the drill bit grinding into stone, he hears something else. At first, he thinks it's the drill screeching from being forced into the wall. But this sounds different. It takes Ted a few seconds to realize it's coming from inside the passage. He yanks out his earplugs just in time to catch the tail end of the most terrifying sound he's ever heard. He describes it as something between a man screaming in fear and a cougar screaming in pain. It echoes through the cave. And then suddenly. Silence. Ted turns to look at Bea. He heard it, too. He's standing straight up, mouth open, eyes wide. Ted can't breathe. He stares into the hole, half expecting to see a face staring back. But there's nothing. Just the darkness of Floyd's tomb stretching away into Black. Beast speaks up first. He tells Ted to grab rocks and shove them into the passage to build a wall between them and whatever made that noise. Ted doesn't need to be told twice. He uses the sledgehammer's handle to push the rocks as deep as he can reach. The entire time, a single thought loops in his head. That sound did not come from an animal. B estimates the scream lasted 8 to 10 seconds. Ted thinks it was closer to 5, 3 seconds while he was still drilling. A second and a half to drop the drill and rip out his earplugs. And half a second of pure, paralyzing terror. You would think that would be enough to make them leave and never come back. But they come back the next day. Ted writes that he's amazed at what a couple of good meals and some sleep can do for a person's attitude. By that morning, they've somehow convinced themselves that the scream had a rational explanation. Maybe it was an animal or some acoustic quirk of the cave. So they climb back down and get to work. B takes up where he left off the day before, hammering at a stubborn piece of the wall. After just a few minutes, a chunk of rock breaks free, and they both cheer. The hole finally looks big enough to get through. Ted decides to go first. He turns his body, puts both arms over his head in a diving position, turns his head sideways and pushes himself into the passage. He gets through, but barely. Ted is on his stomach with his arms pinned to his sides over his head. The passage is so, so narrow that he has to turn his head sideways to fit. There's physically not enough room for his skull to face forward. He can only move by pushing his toes and pulling with one arm. The Ceiling scrapes his back. The floor shreds his chest. Loose rocks jam underneath him as he slides across them. It's slow going and there's no guarantee he'll be able to make it through to a bigger opening. So before he gets all the way in, Ted and Bea tie some webbing to his feet in case he has to get pulled out. The tightest point, about 9ft in, is just about 7 inches high. To get through, Ted has to completely exhale all of the air from his lungs, collapsing his chest just enough to scoot forward a few inches. Then he inhales. His back presses hard against the ceiling and his chest presses hard against the floor. And he has to wait to recover before doing it again. He doesn't make it through this time. His back is rubbing too hard against the ceiling. But he's close. And even though he's pinned to a rock passage barely wider than his body, hundreds of feet underground, Ted is strangely calm. He's pushed himself further than he ever has and he's ready to keep going. He and Bee decides they need to scrape out another inch or so from the cave before Ted can make it through. And on April 7, 2001, Ted decides he's not leaving until he does it. And this time he makes it. He feels the passage start to open. He can lift his head. He can slide his arm underneath his body. He shouts back to Bea, I'm through. Bea is too big to follow him, so they decide Ted should keep going on his own. He's excited to keep going, but he remembers the weird sound that they heard. Bee gives him a pole that they made for passing equipment to use as a weapon, just in case it is an animal. Ted is not too worried, though. He's thinking more about exploring than he is about any potential dangers. Ted decides he'll keep going for a half hour. And as he gets further in, the chamber gets big enough for him to stand up. There's these interesting crystal formations on the wall, almost like clear candle wax melting down the stone. Ted notices that part of one had broken off, although he can't see where the pieces fell. It's one of those things he doesn't really think about, although in hindsight it's a clear sign that he should have turned around right then and there. But he keeps going until the passage opens up into a bigger room, about 15ft high, 15ft wide and 30ft long. By the entrance, he sees a round looking rock leaning against a wall, almost like someone put it there. But that's impossible. Nobody's been in here before for. Or maybe not, because as Ted takes a picture of the room, he notices something, Though it appears to be a crude drawing of figures that look like people with their hands raised, standing beneath a symbol. The drawing looks ancient. It's so faded it's practically blended into the rock itself. But someone must have drawn it, which means there has to be another entrance further into the cave. Ted's half hour is up, though, and he's ready to get out of there. He's overcome with a feeling like he's being watched, and all of a sudden he feels very alone in there. So he turns around and makes his way back out of Floyd's tomb and meets back up with Bee. Ted tells him all about the symbol that he saw, but when he gets the pictures from the rooms printed, they're completely blank. Everything leading up to that point came out fine, but for whatever reason, the picture that he took inside of the chamber with the symbols didn't come out. It's a bummer, but Ted's not done exploring the passage anyway. About a week later, he and Bea bring in a third caver, a thin, experienced guy Ted calls Jo. Jo squeezes through Floyd's tomb easily, but when it's Ted's turn to go through, he smacks his head on the ceiling on the other side and has to stay back. He doesn't want to be a bummer, so he sends Jo ahead alone and tells him to go for another 20 minutes or so until he gets to the room with the symbols. Ted heads back out to wait with Bee until Joe is done. 20 minutes go by. Then 25. Ted is about to go in after him when he sees a light deep in the passage. Joe comes crawling back. He looks terrible. His face is pale. His eyes are wide. His skin is covered in cuts from moving too fast through the passage. When Ted and Bea ask what happened, he doesn't really say. Did he see the crystal formations? No. Did he see the symbols? No. Did he see the round rock? No. He said he just went a little ways in and started to feel sick. But Ted knows that that's impossible. If Joe got far enough into the passage that he couldn't hear them shouting, he would have had to pass the crystals. So why is he lying? When they drop Joe off at home, he's still weirdly quiet. They ask if he wants to go back, and he just shakes his head and runs inside. Ted tries calling him for days afterward, but it just goes to voicemail every time Joe calls in sick to work and doesn't come back for weeks. He never tells them what he saw. The claustrophobia is the thing that makes Ted the Caver unlike any other creepypasta that I've ever covered. Most Internet horror operates on supernatural dread, ghosts, entities, these things that defy explanation. But the terror of Floyd's Tomb is entirely physical. It's the weight of a mountain resting on top of you. It's 7 inches of clearance between the floor and the ceiling. As you're reading it, you can practically feel the breath being squeezed out of your lungs. On that note, the detail that really gets to me is the breathing technique. Exhale to collapse your chest, scoot forward, inhale, and feel the rock breath press against your back and your stomach simultaneously. That's the kind of thing only someone who's actually done this would know to include. And that's what makes Ted the Kafer so effective. Whether it's fiction or not, it reads like a first hand account from someone who intimately understands what it feels like to be inside a space that small. You don't just read it, you feel it. And then there's Joe. Whatever happened to him in that passage, it blew broke him. And saying that he didn't see the crystals when he had to have passed them, that tells you everything. He's not confused, he's not sick. He saw something so disturbing that he can't even acknowledge it out loud. 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- [25:31]
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- [26:04]
Heidi Wong
Two weeks pass before Ted and Bea head back to the cave. After what happened with Joe. They borrow a low voltage two way phone from a local cave rescue group. It's two transceivers connected by a long spool of wire, like a military grade version of two cans tied together by a string. Ted will unspool the wire as he goes deeper, staying in contact with Bee the whole time. He also brings a video camera in a protective case. This time, Bee will see everything Ted does. Something has changed in Ted, though. As he's rigged up the rope to descend into the cave, he feels something he's never felt before. He does not want to go in. It's not a premonition or a sense of dread. He just has no desire to do it. But Ted's obsession gets the best of him. He clips in and goes over the edge. From the start, the cave seems to resist them. Nothing goes smoothly. They fumble with carabiners and knots. They bump into walls. They drop the equipment. It's like the cave itself has become hostile to their presence. But it doesn't stop them outright. Ted makes it through to Floyd's tomb, gets his gear through and begins the journey. He films each section, then crawls to the next one. Bea's voice is crystal clear. The crystal formations look gorgeous on video. And then Ted reaches the large room with the round rock and the crew drawing on the wall like before, he gets the weird feeling that he's being watched. But Ted's completely alone. He films everything and keeps going into another narrow passage about 30ft long before it makes a right hand turn. The walls are darker here. The ceiling is lower and weirdly enough, it's a completely smooth arc, like the well traveled parts of Mystery Cave. Ted plugs in the phone and checks in with Bee. Everything's fine, although Bea. Bea sounds sleepy, almost like he was taking a nap. Ted's surprised. He doesn't feel like he's been gone long enough that Bea would have fallen asleep. But Bea says he's fine and tells him to keep going. And that's when Ted hears it. It's that grinding sound again. Rock sliding on rock. It's loud, it's close. And it's behind him. Ted whips around to face the room and in the same motion that he said, stands up. He forgets how low the ceiling is. His helmet slams into solid rock. His headlamp shatters. Instant, total darkness. Pain shoots through Ted's neck and down his back. His knees buckle. He drops to the ground, unable to see anything in any direction. The grinding sound has stopped, and now the only thing he can hear is his own panicked breathing. He fumbles for the backup light on his helmet, but the batteries are almost dead. It only shines enough light to see a few feet in any direction. Ted points it into the room to see if he can spot whatever made that sound. Nothing. He's shaking violently. He can't help but think, am I going to die here? Ted needs to see what's in that room. He grabs a couple of glow sticks from his pack and cracks them. Then he pulls one out. The soft green glow paints the cave walls in sickly color. Then he does something that takes real courage. He throws one of the glow sticks into the large room. It sails through the air and he watches it illuminate the space as it flies. It passes the round rock and disappears behind it. Everything's as it should be. Next, Ted grabs the phone. He plugs it in and puts it to his ear and hears silence. No dial tone, no beeps. Nothing. He unplugs and replugs. Dead. He tries again. Dead. Ted's terrified, injured and alone. But he refuses to give up. He slowly makes his way back through the room, winding up the phone wire as he goes. Every step crunches on broken rock and sends shadows dancing across the walls. He passes the drawing on the wall and it seems to glow in the green light of the glow stick, like it's offering some kind of warning. And as he approaches the rock at the far end, he realizes it's moved. That was the grinding sound. And now it's sitting on his phone wire. Ted gives the wire a tug and it snaps. His connection to B, to the surface, to the outside world, is gone. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is what the rock was covering. Where it used to sit against the wall, there's now a hole. A passage about 3ft in diameter, angling downwards at 45 degrees into the earth. The walls are smooth, like the ceiling of the passage beyond the room. And somewhere down in the green tinged darkness of that tunnel, Ted can see the glow stick he threw illuminating the way down. And one thing's for sure, he is not going in there to get it. Ted turns and hurries out as fast as his battered body will allow. As he turns his back on the room, a wave of panic crashes over him. He describes it feeling like a legion of demons is about to attack him from behind. Like his salvation lies ahead of him in the darkness and something ancient and terrible is behind him, trying to keep him from reaching it. When Ted finally reaches shouting distance, he screams to Bee to finally get everything ready. Bee asks if he's okay. Ted tells him no. He yells to Bea, there is something in here with us. As Ted enters the squeeze, the breeze intensifies and with it comes a smell. He describes it as damp, rotting, rancid death. It's so overpowering that he almost throws up. He pulls his shirt over his nose and begins to crawl through Floyd's tomb, scraping himself all the way as he desperately tries to escape whatever is behind him. Halfway through, Ted pauses to catch his breath, his cheek pressed against the rock floor. And from deep inside the cave, he hears the grinding sound again. He doesn't stop again after that. He claws his way out of the passage, drops out of the hole and scrambles after Bea, who's already climbing towards the surface. When they reach the bottom of the main pit, Ted starts pulling up the rope from below to speed up their exit. He gets about 50ft of it coiled at his feet. When it snags on something. He tugs, but it won't budge. And then the rope starts moving back into the cave. Something is pulling it down. Ted drops the rope and starts free climbing the pit without any safety attachment. If he slips, the fall onto the jagged rock will kill him. But he makes it. When Ted reaches the top, Bee is kneeling by the tree they anchored their rope to. Ted is covered in blood. Blood from the dozens of cuts. His face is white. His eyes are wide. Bea doesn't look much better. Then they both hear it. The rope around the tree stretches. The knot tightens. Something below is still pulling. B pulls out a pocket knife and cuts the rope. It snaps free and the severed end whips across the rock and disappears over the cliff edge, humming as it goes. It. They don't say a single word on the drive home. Okay. This last visual of the rope being pulled is horrifying because up until that moment, you could come up with some kind of explanation for everything that's happened. Kind of the sound could be geological. The rocks could have shifted naturally, maybe. But something pulling the rope back into the cave? There's no other possible explanation for that. And then there's the aftermath, which is almost worse than the cave itself. Ted spends the next three weeks in his house. He can't eat. He can't sleep. And he starts hearing sounds. Footsteps, shuffling, creaking doors. He's seeing things in the corner of his vision and shapes outside of his window. At night, he closes every blind and drapes in his house. He buys a gun. He goes on meds. He has nightmares so vivid that he can't tell if he's asleep, asleep or awake. He sees a dark figure in his hallway, and the lights flicker, and he flees his own home. Whatever was in that cave followed him out. Or it broke something inside him that can't be fixed. Here's the thing that haunts me the most. The story doesn't end. Ted's final post is dated May 19, 2001. He writes that he, Bea, and Joe, who he finally reconnects with, have all independently felt a compulsion to return to the cave. And Ted's final entry describes his preparations for one last trip. A gun, a knife, a camera, extra lights, and plenty of food and water. He promises he'll update the site when he gets back. He never did. And that's where Ted the caver ends 25 years later. We're still waiting for that final update. Now let me pull back and talk about what this story actually is and why it matters. Ted the Caver first appeared online in early 2001 on a personal website on Angelfire, one of those free web hosting services that you could blog on. The site was designed to look like a real person's real documentation of a real experience, and a lot of people bought it. Eventually, the real Ted came forward, and it turns out Mystery Cave was real, too. And so was the Floyd tomb that he wrote about. Ted said that the story was based on his actual caving experiences with significant fictional embellishments, including the symbol, the round rock, and everything supernatural. But even though the story wasn't real, the horror lingered, and it laid the groundwork for some of the most famous creepypastas we have today. You can see it in a lot of the stories that I've covered already. Ben drowned. Dear David. They both play with the sense of real time updates and digital evidence that really sells the idea. And the reason that people are still talking about Ted the Caver a quarter of a century later is the claustrophobia, not the Physical claustrophobia of Floyd's tomb. It's the emotional claustrophobia, how Ted's fear closes in on him the same way that the cave does. And it never stops. There's also something uniquely terrifying about the idea of one work leading to horror. Most scary stories start with a mistake. Someone reads the wrong book, opens the wrong door, or moves into the wrong house. But Ted doesn't stumble into anything. He labors his way into it. And that makes it so much worse, because you realize the cave didn't come for him. He went to it. He opened a wall that had been sealed, maybe for a reason, and whatever was behind it was patient enough to wait. And at the heart of it all is the question the story refuses to answer. What was in the cave? The symbol suggesting that someone or something has been there before? The round rock that seemingly moves on its own. The smooth walled passage it was blocking. The scream? The smell. The rope being pulled. Something is down there. Something that's intelligent enough to wait and powerful enough to move stone. But the thing is, the story never really shows it to you. It never shows it to you at all. In fact, it never gives you a face or a name or an explanation. And that restraint is what elevates Ted the Caver from a scary story into something deeply unsettling. Because as long as you don't know what's in the cave, it could be anything. And as long as Ted never updates his website, he could still be inside it.
- [37:32]
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- [37:37]
Heidi Wong
Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Twisted Tales, a Crime House original. 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. I'd love to hear from you. What did you think about about Ted the caver? What do you think was in that cave? Leave a comment or review wherever you're tuning in. 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. I'll be back next week with another story, Garrett. 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.
- [38:37]
Carter Roy
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