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Twisted Tales with Heidi Wong
The Devil's Cosmonaut: Horror on a Space Station | Creepypastas
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- [00:00]
Lindsay Cormack
The government gets a bad reputation. But did you know? The roads under your feet, the forecast on your phone, the letter in your mailbox, that's all government, too. I'm Lindsay Cormack, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Government that Doesn't Suck alongside Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Each episode, we tell the surprising story of an American institution. From the postal service to the weather service to the national parks and the parts of government hiding in plain sight. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:37]
Tristan Hughes
This is crime house.
- [00:44]
Heidi Wong
A man alone on a space station with no way down. A thermometer that reads the exact same number every single day while the air slowly cooks him alive. Footsteps in a place where they shouldn't be possible. A notebook that's been recording him. His every move written in his missing crewmate's handwriting. And a friendly voice on the radio. That's the only thing keeping him sane. But it's the one thing he should never have trusted. Today, I'm taking you straight up into orbit for the loneliest, most claustrophobic horror story the Internet has ever set in space. 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 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 a creepypasta called the Devil's Cosmonaut. It's about a man trapped on a crumbling Soviet space station, slowly coming apart while something or someone closes in on him. And what makes it unforgettable is that the author didn't make up the setting. He built his nightmare on top of a real space mission. A mission so strange that even today we don't fully know what happened up there.
- [02:29]
Lindsay Cormack
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- [02:59]
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- [03:31]
Heidi Wong
Quick heads up before we start, this one gets into some pretty intense psychological territory. We're talking isolation, a mental breakdown, drug use, and a bit of body horror. Nothing gratuitous, but it does get pretty intense. The Devil's Cosmonaut was written by an author who goes by Babylon, sometimes credited as the Babylon Project, and it first showed up on the Creepypasta Wiki back in 2016. The author has stayed anonymous, which honestly suits a storyline like this, because the whole thing was designed to feel less like fiction and more like a classified file that someone wasn't supposed to read. What I love the most about this one is the setting. Almost every Creepypasta we cover is set somewhere that you've been before. A bedroom, a hallway, the woods behind your house. This one drops you somewhere you'll probably never go. A tiny metal can in the freezing vacuum of space where if anything goes wrong, there's absolutely nowhere to run and no one to come and save you. And here's the hook that sets it apart. The author used the names of real cosmonauts on a real station, on a real mission. So as I tell you the story of Boris, just know he's a fictionalized version of an actual person. We'll get into who that man really was at the end, and trust me, the truth is somehow even more unsettling than fiction. This is a slow burn. There's no creature jumping out at you in the first two minutes. The horror creeps in the way real fear does, through a smell, a sound, something that doesn't look right. And by the end, it's hard to know what's real. Picture a space station in the late 1970s, not the gleaming high tech International space station we know today. This is older from the Soviet Union. It's a crampled tube of beeping radios, flickering lights and blaring alarms with about 100 cubic meters of stale recycled air. It's the kind of place where every surface is within arm's reach and there's not much to separate you from the endless vacuum of space. There's only one man aboard. His name is Boris. He's a cosmonaut. And he's supposed to have a partner up here, a flight engineer named Jolabov. But he's gone now. While climbing out of the airlock one day, he brought the hatch down on his hand and severed three of his fingers. Boris was the one who had to bandage him, listen to him sob through the night and. And in detail I can't stop thinking about. Scrape the fingers off the inside of the hatch. It wasn't the type of injury that you can recover from up there. So a rescue capsule came and took Jolobaov home. But after that, Boris can't reach mission control. They've been silent for days. Apparently, solar flares are knocking out long range communications. So now it's just Boris, alone. But he's not completely, completely alone up there. There's a voice on the radio. It belongs to a commander named Zhudoff. On another spacecraft, a Soyuz capsule with his own flight engineer. Zhudof does his best to keep Boris spirits up. Every conversation ends the same way. Only a few more days. Zudoff's ship was on its way to relieve Boris. Just a handful of days and he won't be alone anymore. It's Boris, only tether to another human being in the entire universe. The first thing that goes wrong is the heat. It's too warm on the station. Boris wakes up soaked in sweat, the sleeping bag clinging to his skin, the air uncontrollably thick. He's practically swimming through it. So he figures, okay, the temperature control must be malfunctioning. So he checks the thermometer. It reads 19.8 degrees Celsius, which for reference is 67.64 degrees Fahrenheit. So it should be nice and comfortable. But the air still feels too hot. So Boris checks it the next day. 19.8. The day after that. 19.8. The number on the screen says everything is perfectly fine. While Boris is dripping with sweat and gasping in air that feels like soup, he runs diagnostics. But the computer insists there's no problem. In that little crack between what the instruments say and what his own body is screaming at him, the becomes the first thing that starts to break him. He tells Zudoff about it over the radio, and Zudoff tells Boris to report back if it gets worse and to drink plenty of water. Boris laughs it off because what else can he do? Then comes the noises. It's a deep echoing thump from somewhere in the station. Boris flinches every time he hears it, but he's a trained cosmonaut, so he explains it away. It's just space junk hitting the hull of or, the metal expanding and contracting as the station passes from sunlight into shadow. That's all. Things don't fall in zero gravity. They drift. They definitely don't thump. He tells himself that, but it reminds him of something else. The sound the hatch made when it slammed down on his crewmates fingers. And here's where the heat starts doing something to Boris mind. He keeps slipping into feverish flashbacks of Joloba's last day, replaying the accident, the hatch coming down, the thump of the metal on bone. The line between memory and the present start to blur. He can't think straight. The mechanical manuals he tries to read seem to melt and twist in front of his eyes. At one point the migraine gets so bad he genuinely feels like his skull is splitting open and his brain is spilling out in front of him. That's when he does the thing he swore he'd never do. There's a bottle of sleeping pills in the very back of the medical cabinet. At the start of the mission, he promised himself he would never touch them. But Boris can't take the heat, the noise, the spinning thoughts anymore. So he takes the pills and he goes out like a light. When he wakes up, the heat is gone. The station is cool and dark, almost peaceful. For a moment, floating there in the quiet with stars out in the porthole, he feels safe. And then he hears a clatter. Then there's movement just at the edge of his vision. Boris spins around. Of course there's nothing there. He tells himself it's impossible anyway. Things don't clatter in space. It's just his imagination getting the better of him to help himself calm down. He calls Zudoff. And this time something's different. The warm, chatty commander sounds distant, distracted even. Boris tells him the temperature problem fixed itself, and Zoodoff barely seems to care. There's a coldness creeping into his voice that Boris can't quite name. But Boris is exhausted and relieved to be cool again. So he lets it go. He shouldn't have. Okay, so the thermometer. That detail is so much smarter than it looks. Most haunting stories show you that something is obviously wrong. Blood on the walls, a figure in the corner. This story shows you something is wrong in the plainest way possible. A number that won't change your body says that you're burning up. The screen says you're fine. And that tiny contradiction is the first thread that once you pull it unravels everything. Because if you can't trust the instruments, what can you trust? I also want to point out how good the pacing is here. The author makes you sit in the mundane stuff, the sweat, the recycled air, the daily radio check ins until it feels real and lived in and almost boring. And that's the trap. By the time the thump starts, you're already so locked into Boris tiny world that one wrong sound makes your skin crawl. And here's the part that gets me personally Boris has one lifeline, one friendly voice in the entire void. We've all had that, the one person that you cling to when everything else is falling apart. So watch what the story is setting up. It's not threatening that lifeline yet. It's just letting it go a little cold, a little distant. And that somehow is scarier than if the radio had just cut out.
- [11:42]
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- [12:30]
Heidi Wong
groceries just how you like.
- [12:32]
Tristan Hughes
Ten years after Troy, Odysseus is still lost war hero, liar, survivor, and the man at the heart of one of history's greatest stories. Stories. I'm Tristan Hughes, and all of this month on the Ancients, I'm going to be sailing through Homer's treacherous world of monsters, witchcraft and tempestuous gods, exploring the real archaeology and history beneath the myths. From Troy to Ithaca, this is Odysseus. Like you've never heard him before. Join us on the Ancients from History hit. Listen now and subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
- [13:19]
Heidi Wong
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word. My champions, I have sold my chariot on Carvana. Twas a lovely suv, an inexplicably queenly offered. They're even coming to the castle to collect it. Tonight we feast. An offer you can feast on. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. So Boris settles into an uneasy routine. Sleep with the pills. Wake up, check the thermometer. Still 19.8. Talk to Zudoff. Try not to think too hard about the thumps. And then one morning, he wakes up and notices the medical cabinet is open just slightly, a couple inches. But it has a sliding door, the kind that can't just drift open on its own because there's no breeze up there to push it. Boris floats there, staring at the cabinet, trying to remember if he left it open when he got the sleeping pills out. And he realizes he can't remember. He can't remember if that was last night or. Or the night before. His memory is going soft and slippery events sliding out of order. He searches the cabinet. Nothing's missing. Nothing's moved. He tells himself he must have left it open, but it's the first time the station itself has done something he can't explain. And once you notice one thing like that, you start noticing everything. The next night is when it gets bad. Boris wakes up and there's a cloud floating in the middle of the cabin. A swirling black cloud. Hundreds of tiny dark specks drifting in zero gravity, like a little galaxy gone dark. For a second, his brain can't even process it. It's carbon powder. The dark dust from one of the station's air filters. He swims towards it and grabs the source of the leak. A small metal box about the size of a paperback book. This filter is supposed to sit deep inside the air filtration system behind a sealed access panel. The kind of thing you'd need tools and a reason to open. And when Boris looks up at the panel, it's hanging wide open. The filter's been pulled out. Now, this is genuinely dangerous. The air filters are a part of what keeps him alive. So Boris gets on the radio and tells Zudoff something is with wrong. Very, very wrong. That a filter came loose or got knocked out or. He can't even finish the thought because the implications are too terrifying. Filters don't unscrew themselves from behind a sealed Panel. And Zudoff's response chills him more than the filter does, because he doesn't panic or sound alarmed. He just asks flatly if it's fixable and tells Boris the ground is still unreachable. The warmth is almost completely gone now. The man who fussed over Boris, drinking enough water, can barely be bothered to react to a life support failure. Boris runs the diagnostics again. The computer reports zero errors, no alarms triggered, nothing detected, while a filter floats in pieces in the middle of the room. That night, Boris is half asleep when he hears it. A thump from the far side of the station, near the flight deck. Then another. Closer. Then another, closer still. And the gaps between them are shrinking, getting closer, each one rattling the whole station. And Boris, frozen in his sleeping bag, finally lets himself understand what he's hearing. Their footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, impossible footsteps, walking across a space station in zero gravity, getting closer and closer to the little compartment where he's strapped down and helpless. He's thrashing to get out of the restraint, sobbing, when the footsteps reach his door and stop. Silence. He presses his ear to the plastic. Nothing. Then something slams into the door so hard he's thrown backwards against the wall. And then silence again for the rest of the night. When morning comes, Boris is barely holding it together. He calls Zudoff. He needs that voice. He needs his friend to tell him it's going to be okay. Instead, what comes through the radio is music crackling through the static. Where Zudoff's voice should be is a piece of classical music. Tchaikovsky. A piano concerto, swelling and falling through the speakers. Boris is screaming Zurof's name through the microphone. Answer me, please. And the music just keeps playing, like the station is mocking him. And in that moment, Boris realizes the thing he's been refusing to think for days. He might not be alone up here. There's only one place on the station that Boris never goes to. Jolobaov's old sleeping compartment. It's been sealed shut since the day his crewmate left, and it's locked. And Boris doesn't have the key, so he gets a knife from the kitchen and he forces his way in. The smell hits him first. Dried blood and sweat. The ghost of the night Jolabov bled into that room. And then he sees them. Pill bottles. At least 10 of them, floating around the compartment. They're all painkillers, and they're all empty. A horrible new thought forms in Boris mind. There are enough drugs in here to knock out an elephant. Was Joloba an addict? Or did he take Them on purpose, all at once, so that when the hatch came down on his hand, he wouldn't feel a thing. Did Joloba want to get hurt? Did he want to do something to himself, just to get a ticket off of this station? And then Boris finds the notebook. It has a small black cover wrapped in brown paper. He opens it to a random page, and there's Joloba's handwriting. And it's about Boris. Boris Woke up 5:45. Took shower for 12 minutes, shaved for approximately 5 minutes, missed several spots, drank approximately 200ml of water, ate breakfast. Page after page after page, a minute by minute log of everything Boris did. Every meal, every shower, every conversation, how long he spent on the toilet. All of it recorded in this cold, clinical, obsessive detail. There's an entry for every single day of the mission, right up until three days before the accident. And then it just stops. Boris feels sick. This man that he felt sorry for, whose fingers he scraped off a hatch. That man had been watching him, studying him like a specimen. And Boris had no idea why. That's the moment this story stops being a creepy, empty house in space story and starts becoming something that genuinely crawls under your skin. Because up until now, the horror has been environmental. The heat, the filter, the footsteps, stuff happening to the station, seemingly in border Boris mind. Like, I really thought pretty much up until this point that Boris was just, I don't know, deprived of oxygen up in there and like, was losing his mind, hallucinating. You know, the normal black mirror stuff. But the notebook makes it personal. It means that this entire mission, while Boris thought he was just doing his job, someone was two feet away, mogging his every brain, breath. And it had been happening before anything supernatural started. And think about what that does to the timeline of the whole story. The footsteps, the filter, the open cabinet. Your first instinct is, okay, this all started recently. Something is probably wrong with Boris. But the notebook tells you the wrongness, goes back to day one. It reframes everything that we just read. Here's the detail that I find genuinely brilliant, though. And it's a question, not an answer. The notebook stops three days before Jolabov's accident. But why? The author never tells you. And that empty space, those missing three days is scarier than anything he could have written in them. And I have to say, because we've all done a version of this, Boris keeps explaining things away. The thumps are space junk. The cabinet, he must have left it open. The heat, it's a sensory problem. He's doing the thing that every person in every horror story does, building a little wall of irrational excuses behind himself and a truth he doesn't want to face. We judge those characters just leave the house, but put yourself up there alone with no way down. Wouldn't you also tell yourself it was nothing? Because the alternative is admitting you're trapped in a metal box with something you can't explain. If you're not unsettled yet, stay with me, because this next part is when the floor finally drops out.
- [22:37]
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- [23:41]
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- [24:11]
Heidi Wong
Boris is unraveling now. He takes anxiety pills to slow slow his racing heart. He starts hallucinating vivid, terrifying hallucinations where he's falling out of orbit, plummeting towards the earth, the atmosphere burning white hot around him. He keeps jerking away from these visions, drenched and gasping, never quite sure if he's still dreaming. And then he overhears something that he was never meant to hear. He goes to use the radio and there's already a transmission coming through, but it's not his usual frequency. It's a dial that has been changed. Boris knows that he didn't change it. And through the static, he hears Zudof's voice. Except Zudof isn't talking to him. He's talking about him. Boris only catches fragments of it. Zurof is describing a subject who is having visual and auditory hallucinations, along with paranoia and a loss of appetite. And then another voice answers. A voice that's not Zudoff or his flight engineer. It's a third man. Someone else. And the voice says, keep observing him. And then there's more. Something about the air. The air is contaminated. And Zurof confirms it, saying the concentration is up to 21%. And the stranger replies, carry on observing, nothing more. The communications with the ground were never down. There were no solar flares. Zudov has been able to reach mission Control this entire time, which means every reassurance, every. Only a few more days, every gentle reminder to drink his water. It was all theater. That he's not here on a mission. He's here to be watched. The notebook wasn't his crewmates stalking him. It was the reason that he was there. And that word contaminated 21%. The air that Boris is breathing is poisoned. Which means maybe the heat, the footsteps, the clattering, the cloud of carbon dust. Maybe some of it really is in his head. A brain slowly suffocating on toxic air. Or maybe it's all real and the poison is just the excuse. Boris will never know. And neither will you. That's the trap the whole story has been building. He can't trust the instruments. He can't trust his senses. And now he can't trust the one voice that kept him human. He confronts Zudoff on the radio, asks him point blank if they've been able to reach ground control yet. And Zudoff smoothly says, no, comrade. Still out. Solar flares. And something in Boris just breaks. That's when he hears the breathing. A deep, wet, rasping breath coming from inside the walls. In, out, in, out. The slow rhythm of something alive, sealed inside the guts of the station. Boris grabs his knife and presses his ear to a maintenance panel. And. And the breathing is right there on the other side of the metal. Then a bang from inside, and scratching, fingernails dragging on steel. He confronts Zudoff one more time, tells him that there's something breathing in the walls. And for the first time, Zudoff sounds nervous. He insists it's just the ventilation. A ruptured air pipe, nothing more. He'll take A look when he arrives. In fact, he's making his approach right now. Boris isn't sure which is worse, the thing in the walls or the smiling liar about to dock with his station. He tells Zudoff to stay away, that he has a knife. There's a long, cold pause. Then Zudoff says quietly, I'm so sorry, and the radio goes dead. Now everything happens all at once. Boris watches, paralyzed with fear. And as the screws on that maintenance panel begin to turn by themselves, one slow, screeching rotation at a time, something on the other side patiently unscrewing its way out, Boris does the only thing left to do. He pulls himself to the airlock, right next to the old bloodstain from Jolabov's accident. And he waits for the capsule to dock. Because whatever Zudoff is, at least he's human. At least he's a way off. There's a heavy clunk as the relief capsule connects. The seals hiss. Boris pounds on the hatch behind him. He can hear the entity behind the panel finishing its work, something coming free in the cabin. The airlock hisses open, and Boris looks into the capsule, into the tiny space where Zudoff should be sitting. But it's empty. Look. This ending answers basically nothing. And that is one of the reasons why it works and is so memorable. The capsule is empty. So either Zudoff was never real and every conversation that Boris ever had with him was a hallucination, a poisoned brain inventing a friend to survive the isolation, or something has been wearing Zudoff's voice this whole time to keep Boris calm, compliant, and exactly where it wanted him. If you ask me, either way, it's devastating and the story refuses to pick one. What this whole thing is really about, underneath the space station and the monsters, is that the most basic fear there is is not being able to trust your own mind. Boris notices weird little details first. Then he loses his memory and his senses. Then finally, the one voice keeping him sane. By the end, there's no solid ground left to stand on, and he's the only one who can't tell whether the thing hunting him is in the walls or in his own head. The fan theories on this one are great, by the way. Some readers think the whole thing is a slow toxic gas death, and the supernatural stuff is just a dying man's brain. Others think that there's a genuine entity and that it got to Jolab first, that he started feeling watched, became obsessed, and started keeping that notebook because he thought that Boris was the one stalking Him. And then there's the question that breaks everyone's brain. If Zudoff was never really there, then who sent that capsule? So here's what I have to tell you. And it's the part that took this story from really good creepypasta to IK stop thinking about this. Almost everything in the setting is real. The author didn't invent Boris. He's based on a real Soviet cosmonaut named Boris. Volunov, Jolobov, Zhudov and his crewmate. All real too. The station, the mission, all of it really happened, and not all that differently from this story. In 1976, Boris and Jolabov launched to a military Soviet space station called Salyut 5. Their mission was supposed to last roughly two months, but it ended early and so suddenly that even the Soviet state radio was caught off guard when they were told the men would be back on the ground in 10 hours. And the cosmonauts came down in darkness, hundreds of miles off course. So why did they bail out early? For years, the official story was vague. But here's what reporting eventually pieced together. A strange, acrid odor developed inside the station's air system. Later accounts point to the atmosphere becoming contaminated, possibly with toxic fumes from a fuel leak. A crew's health and mental state spun out of control. Soviet press at the time talked about the cosmonauts experiencing sensory problems. One account described a crew member becoming psychotic. They reported landing in genuinely a bad fate, physical and mental shape. And this is the detail that gives me chills. Ground psychologists had started playing music up to the crew to ease the effects of the isolation. And it gets better or worse, depending on how you look at it. The relief crew, Zudoff and his flight engineer really did launch to take over that station a couple months later on a Soyuz capsule. And they never made it aboard. Their docking system failed, failed. And they couldn't link up with the station at all. So they aborted and headed home, straight into a blizzard. Their capsule came down in the middle of a half frozen lake in the dark, dragged underwater by its own parachute. It took rescuers nine hours to pull them out. They almost drowned. So think about what the author did here in real life. The relief crew never made it to the station. And the creepypasta ends with that relief crew's cap capsule docking completely empty. The fiction and the history line up in a way that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Oh, and the real Boris. Seven years before all of this, on his very first spaceflight, his Capsule service module failed to separate during re entry. He came screaming back through the atmosphere, facing the wrong way, hanging in his straps, the hatch seals smoldering and filling the cabin with fumes as the space spacecraft burned around him, righting itself right before the hatch melted through. Then the landing rockets failed. He slammed into the frozen ground and the impact shattered some of his teeth. He climbed out and walked through 40 below cold to find help in the creepypasta. Boris hallucinates burning up as he falls towards Earth. The real man actually lived it. Of course, none of the supernatural stuff happened. The real Jolov didn't cut off his own fingers. He got sick and he went home. There was no notebook, no monster in the walls, no sinister voice. The real men weren't villains and they weren't crazy. They were cosmonauts, pushed to a breaking point by genuinely dangerous and terrifying situations. And they survived it all. By the way, Boris is still with us. He's in his 90s and he's a legitimate hero. And that's exactly what makes this the Devil's cosmonaut so effective. The author didn't have to invent the fear. He just took the real story. A poisoned space station, a crew coming apart from the isolation, and a rescue that ended in a frozen lake, and asked one quiet, what if it wasn't just the air? What if it was something up there with them? And that question lands so hard because of where it's set. Remember in the story, the scariest betrayal isn't the thing in the walls. It's that Ground Control was lying to Boris the whole time. And the real Soviet space program was the exact kind of place that could make that feel believable. Failures getting buried, disasters being kept quiet for decades. The world only found out about Boris Volanov's near fatal flight years later, after it happened. So when a story tells you about a cosmonaut that was secretly being watched, his crisis hidden from the world, that doesn't exactly feel like fantasy. It feels like something that could have been classified. Space is already the one thing where, if something went wrong, nobody could ever hear you, no one could come. Add a government with every reason to keep the door locked, and you got the perfect setting for a secret. No. Nobody will ever dig up. That's the real horror of the night sky. It's not aliens. It's the science. It's the empty vacuum between you and every other living soul. And the slow, creeping suspicion that you might not be as alone in that nothingness as you think. So the next time that you look up at a bright little dot moving across the stars, just remember that there are people up there right now in a small metal can, trusting their instruments, trusting their crewmates, trusting the voice on the radio, and hoping with everything that they've got, that the number on the screen is telling them the truth. 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 the Devil's cosmoderation? Not could you survive months alone in space? And if you started hearing things, would you trust your own mind? 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 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.