Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo beaming from the lighthouse in Sandcastle, California from the KSND radio waves – the Sound of the Sea. I’m watching the waves right now and I think I see a Mermaid or two swimming there in the distance or maybe it’s just a trick of the eye like so many things here in Sandcastle.
Be sure to check out my website at Spooky Boo’s Scary Story Time to learn more about the show and the authors of the Creepypasta stories at www.scarystorytime.com/creepypasta.
Before I begin, I’d like that thank my listeners and Patreon members for their support including 933TheVolt, BubbleSlayer, Ivy Iverson, Oliver, and P.A. Nightmares. This show would not be possible without the support of Patrons and listeners. If you would like to listen to the show commercial-free, visit www.patreon.com/spookybooscarystorytime where you will get the commercial-free podcast and other goodies. You’ll find other ways to support the show at www.scarystorytime.com/
Come with me and watch Creature Features on Saturday nights in their YouTube chat room. We love talking about the old horror movies while horror host Vincent Van Dahl interviews fun guests and Mr. Livingston puts up with Tangella’s shenanigans. Find out your watch time at www.creaturefeatures.tv.
Now let’s begin…
Methenes Chapel
The Goat roared down the dusty country road, shattering the silence of the late October twilight. The Goat was a 1969 Pontiac GTO “Judge”, Ram Air and a Rock Crusher transmission. Jay had painted it a glowing, canary “arrest me” yellow, and he had mounted a goat skull on the dash. “You wanna see Methenes Chapel?” Jay shouted at me over the roar.
“Sure,” I said.
We were college roommates, both nineteen, weird, into heavy metal, goth, industrial, and false occultism. We both knew our inverted pentagrams were fake, but it surely offended the normals in those small, rural Alabama farming communities. One of our favorite activities was ghost-hunting, which to us meant driving to supposedly haunted locations and acting out our own developmentally-challenged “Beavis and Butthead” episodes.
Jay jerked the wheel sharply, and The Goat slewed onto a smaller dirt side road. “What’s Methane Chapel? Temple of Farts?” I asked.
“Meth-eee-neees, you asshole. It’s a long ‘eee’ sound. It’s an old abandoned church,” Jay said. “It’s about halfway between here and Buck’s Pocket. We can park The Goat around back and nobody can see it from the road.”
“Did you bring The Kit?” I asked. The Kit was our ghost-hunting kit: flash lights, glow sticks (in case ghosts ate our flash lights, I suppose), wooden stakes, rock salt, chalk, candles, a camera, and a crucifix filched from some relative’s dining room wall.
“Of course. It’s in the trunk,” Jay said. Jay was about a foot taller than me, lanky, with long wispy black hair and a thin goatee of which he was inordinately proud. He wore a black leather duster, black jeans, and black cowboy boots. I stood an even five and a half feet, and weighed a hundred pounds in my own grey trench coat. Ten years later, we would have been instantly marked as “trench-coat mafia”, and likely arrested solely on the suspicion of being suspicious, but in the early nineties a kid could get away with dressing poorly.
Jay drove The Goat more slowly down the winding dirt road, and began to tell me the story of Methenes Chapel.
“A while back this lady named Elise Whitley and a bunch of her friends decided to break away from their local church, and make a new church. I think part of it was that she decided God had told her she should be a preacher, and her church wouldn’t let her because you have to have a cock to talk about God or whatever. She and her friends got enough money together to build a church, and they built it off Gray’s Gap Road. The problem was, they built the church on land that was right next to a big grow operation. These were not people that you fuck with; they would just kill you and bury you in the woods if you bothered their operation.
“The church had a few Sundays, and about a month after it opened, Roger Clem, the boss of the grow-op, showed up outside the church. When Elise came out at the end of services, Clem went up to her and told her, point-blank, that she was to move her congregation elsewhere, or she would be sorry. Elise laughed at Roger Clem, and told him God had filled her with the Holy Spirit and she feared no man. Clem didn’t say anything to that; he just nodded his head once and walked off.
“A few weeks later, one Sunday morning, the church caught fire. The whole congregation was inside, and someone had chained the doors shut. Most of the people got out the side door, but Elise Whitley burned to death trying to rescue some kid.
“Of course, Clem had an alibi and never got busted. The remaining congregation vowed to rebuild, and they did. Six months later, they opened the doors to a new church, built on the same spot as the old one. The congregation said it just wasn’t the same. The place felt bad, felt wrong. People that were there alone said they felt like they were being watched. Others heard noises, laughter, or crying. That building nearly burned down three times in the first month, twice due to faulty electrical outlets and finally due to a freak lightning strike.
“Maybe the lightning strike was the last straw. The congregation dispersed, and the building sat empty. I’ve been up there once, and it was creepy, but never at night.”
“First off, let me point out that you’re an asshole,” I said. “That story is total bullshit. You’re going to take me to another burned-out cow barn and swear it’s a meeting ground for Satanists.”
“It is not!” Jay protested. “I’ve been out there once, and it’s really there! It’s creepy as hell, man!”
“If it sucks, I get to drive The Goat on the way back.”
Jay laughed. “Deal. You’ll never get to drive The Goat.”
Half an hour later, Jay whipped The Goat onto a nearly-hidden dirt track in the midst of a thick wall of vegetation. A minute later, and we saw it: Methenes Chapel. At first glance, the building was not very impressive. It was a single story building of indeterminate architecture, white paint peeling from wood siding, blind vacant windows staring into the darkened interior. The building may have once been made of straight square lines, but time and neglect had warped and softened those lines, so that none of them were straight. The building seemed slumped, slouched on the ground as if exhausted. Trees and bushes had grown up around the building, limbs pressing against the siding, their silhouettes framed in the dying orange light of the autumn sky.
Jay eased the car around the building, peering into the doorless openings. He pulled the car up and back so it was facing the entrance, in case we needed to make a quick getaway, and we got out. No, Methenes Chapel had not seemed impressive from inside the car, but once outside, the hush around the building had a weight to it. The building felt less slouched, and more like it was hunched, and waiting. “Pop the trunk, Jay. This is not a good place.”
Rather than rub it in my face, Jay quietly opened the trunk. We both grabbed flashlights and glow sticks, and I grabbed the Polaroid camera. Jay shut the trunk and started off toward the rear door of the building. I started popping Polaroids at the entrance. We moved through the open doorway, and into the Chapel.
“This place is a wreck. You seriously need to watch where you put your feet.” I shined my flashlight around the floor. “Half these boards are rotten. If you get a nail through one of those gay cowboy boots, I will definitely be driving The Goat tonight.”
“Here’s the work of a genius,” Jay said, shining his light on the wall opposite the door. There was a crude pentagram in red spray paint, with the phrase “SATIN IS THE DEVL” written around it.
“Yeah, you better watch out for Satin. He’ll … do what, make your sheets soft?” I said. Jay laughed, and moved to the next room. I popped another Polaroid, while Jay swung the flashlight beam around. We were standing in what must have been the main room of the church. Smashed and splintered pews were stacked in heaps against the walls. In a small area at the front of the room, beer cans and litter suggested someone had once camped there. We walked into the room. Jay turned toward the doorway on the right, and a voice boomed: “PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR.”
We both flinched. “What?” Jay said.
“PLEASE STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR.”
Jay turned and began to run back the way we came. “Some redneck drug dealer is messing with my car!” he yelled. I followed him into the hallway, and through the open doorway, into another room. Jay stopped for a second, then ran through the doorway at the back of the room, into another hallway.
“Umm, this isn’t the way we came,” I said, looking at the featureless gray walls.
“Yeah, I know. Let’s go back to that first hallway, I think.” We turned around and retraced our steps to the first hallway. “Try that door,” Jay said.
“None of the doorways we’ve been through have had doors,” I said.
“I know, but I think it’s the right way,” Jay said. I pulled the door open, and went through into another small, dark room.
“We must be in the middle of the church. There’s no windows in this room,” I said, as we walked across the room to another doorway. Jay opened that door, and we looked down a long hallway, with several identical doors along its length.
“Please step away from the car.”
Jay looked at me. “That sounded far away, man.”
“Yeah. Really far away, and on the wrong side of the building. This is fucked. This place is not that big. It’s only a couple hundred feet long.”
Jay reached for the knob of a door across the hallway. As his hands closed on the black metal, something slammed into the door from the other side. The door shook in its frame, and Jay jumped back. The distant sound of a car alarm began to blare from our left, down the hallway. “Go!” I yelled, pulling Jay’s coat, and we both ran down the hallway. We ran through room after room, following the sound of The Goat’s car alarm, until we stumbled out the room with the pentagram sprayed upon its wall. We leaped through the open door, pushed through the weeds and overgrowth and reached Jay’s car.
For a panicked moment, Jay couldn’t find his keys. Cursing, he ripped at his jeans pocket until he snagged the keychain. Hauling the keys out, he triggered the alarm remote. “VIPER IS ARMED,” said the alarm. We looked at each other. Jay pressed the remote again. “VIPER IS DISARMED.” We got into the car, carefully checking the back seat.
As Jay nosed The Goat down the overgrown path to the road, I took a final look at Methenes Chapel. It was only a glance, but to this day I can remember seeing her in the doorway, pale dress blowing in the autumn wind, black eyes filled with so much rage.
Story Number 2
The Thing on the TV
When I was about thirteen, I stayed at my uncle’s house over the summer. I didn’t know it, but my parents were getting divorced and they wanted me to have a fun summer without dealing with the stress of moving. I loved my uncle’s place, so I was thrilled to find out that I would get to stay there all summer.
My uncle’s house was not very pretty, a big old farmhouse with peeling yellow paint, but the farm was amazing. I was from the city, and my house barely had a yard, much less twenty acres of fields and forest, and a creek that ran through it all. At first, my favorite thing to do was to simply run through those fields, as hard as I could, until I was so hot and exhausted I thought I might pass out, then jump into the cool waters of the forest-shaded creek.
In the evenings, my uncle would go out. He was divorced, and preferred to spend a few hours across the county line at his favorite watering hole. Neither of us felt unsafe about me staying alone. It was a small community of neighbors, and there were quite a few loaded guns around the old farmhouse. As dusk fell on those long summer days, I would climb into my uncle’s beat-up old recliner, and watch his old TV until I fell asleep.
Late one evening, I started having problems keeping the TV tuned to the right station. I crouched in front of it, slowly turning the fine-tuning ring. The TV was built into a huge wooden cabinet, but had a relatively small screen. This was long before the days of digital tuning, so picking up broadcasts from far away was often an exercise of patience and of amateur radio skills. I was desperate to see an old re-run of ‘Lost in Space’, so I kept fiddling with the tuning dials in the hopes of picking up audio, and more video than a fuzzy, rolling outline. In a fit of frustration, I spun the knob far to the left, and stomped off to the kitchen to make a sandwich.
While I was making my sandwich, I heard a sound from the living room that made me pause. There is a sound that a person makes in a room, an absence of absence, rather than any real noise. I spun around, butter knife clutched tightly in my hand. There was nothing there. I cautiously walked back into the living room, where the TV sat showing snow and hissing quietly. Nobody. Weird. I went back to the kitchen and finished my sandwich. As I opened the refrigerator for a can of soda, I heard another sound. “Aaaahhh,” it sighed.
I was alone in the house, but I refused to be a chicken. I thought the TV must have finally started to pick up some channel. “Oh, yeah,” I said, as I remembered. Old TV’s, like my uncle’s, could sometimes receive radio stations, or even shortwave. My uncle showed me that trick last year. “Maybe that’s what it is.” I took my sandwich and cola back into the living room, and put them on top of the TV. As I reached for the tuning knob, I saw something on the screen. I blinked, and moved back away from the screen.
The white and black dots of electronic snow danced on the screen, accompanied by a low whispering hiss. I stared at the screen for a second, two, three. Nothing. I laughed. “Now you’re seeing stuff. And talking to yourself.” I looked away for a moment, and something caught my eye. I looked back at the screen. There, in the bright swirl of dots, was a shape. I don’t know if the shape had been there all along, or if it had simply taken my mind a few moments to see it, like those dot-pictures at the mall. I stared, eyes riveted to the screen, as an image resolved. In the static, I began to see the sweep of a brow, the slope of a nose, the curve of a mouth and chin. The screen rolled once, black bars slipping down, and the static faded away.
I was looking at the face of a girl, dark eyes, black hair curly and cropped at the shoulders. Her face briefly filled the screen, and then grew smaller as she stepped away. I realized with a shock that I was looking at my uncle’s living room, at my uncle’s chair. I saw myself on the screen, and I saw the girl walk towards me. I looked around wildly, but there was nobody in the room. I looked back at the TV. She was standing right next to me. She looked directly at the screen. I watched, on the TV, as she took my hand. My hand began to burn with cold, and I saw her smile the most terrible smile.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.
I ran, as fast as I could, through the nearest doorway, into my uncle’s bedroom. I slammed the door and flipped on the lights, then jumped onto his bed. I sat there, on his bed, watching the occasional headlights splash through the large windows, until he came home. I tried to tell him what I saw, but he wouldn’t listen to any of it. He was mostly drunk and just wanted to go to bed. The next morning, he had me nearly convinced it was just a dream; that perhaps I had fallen asleep in his chair, and had a nightmare.
I went home the next weekend, to a house that I’d never seen before, and to a father who had moved to a different town. I mostly forgot about the thing I saw on my uncle’s TV. I thought about it when I overheard my mother and my aunt talking in hushed tones about a terrible thing that happened at my uncle’s place — a tenant family had died, in bad circumstance. I thought about it more recently when my mother told me the house had burned down after a car came off the curve and crashed into the side of the place.
I think about that summer a lot now. We don’t have analog TVs any more, and I never listen to the radio, so I never hear static. But sometimes, in the white noise of a thunderstorm, or even in the stillness of my own room at night, I hear her voice.
“I’m still waiting.”
Story number 2
The Gap in the Wall
by Eric Dodd
My name is China Westerson. China, like the country, not the dinnerware. I am nearly nineteen, and I am haunted. You might think it strange that I say that I am haunted, instead of saying, perhaps, I live in a haunted house, or I have seen a ghost. There’s a difference. When you’re haunted, it follows you.
I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, in my great-uncle John’s ancient Greek Revival, and it was a haunted house. Nothing too impressive; objects would move when you weren’t looking, doors that you had closed on the way out would be open upon returning home. We liked the ghosts of that house. They seemed like family, and according to my great-uncle, a few were. Old houses always have ghosts, he said. They have ghosts just like they have wood rot, plumbing problems, and bad wiring.
This is not to say that new places don’t have ghosts. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.
I moved to Florence, Alabama, to attend the University of North Alabama. My mother is a teacher, my father is a teacher, and I knew that I wanted to teach since I was six. Although UNA isn’t the best school in the state, it is a very good teaching college. Besides, my great-uncle, grandfather, and mother are all alumni, so it was practically required that I go there.
My first college apartment was at a newly-opened complex at Irvine and Pine street. Some member of my family had pulled strings, again, and I found myself in a beautiful one bedroom wonder, full of light and the scent of new paint. It was an easy walk to class, which meant I never had to fight for parking. As the first few weeks of college passed, I made new friends, and had them over, and each one professed jealousy of my fabulous new apartment.
My friend Marcia complained about the flies first. “Close the windows, girl. You’re letting flies in here,” she complained. I blinked. I honestly hadn’t noticed anything, but Marcia was right. There were several flies buzzing around. We checked the windows, but they were all closed. I checked for gaps in the sliding glass door, and around the front door, but they were new and looked fine.
“Maybe they got in during construction, like, as babies,” Marcia said.
“Flies don’t have babies. They have maggots.”
“Ew gross! Hey, maybe this is it,” Marcia pointed at the far corner of the living room, past the sliding glass door, behind a beat up old rocker I found at the thrift store for twenty bucks. (I call him Eddie Money, ha ha).
“What… the…” I shoved the rocking chair aside, and peered up at the corner of the living room wall. There was a gap.
“Well there’s your problem,” Marcia said, making a walrus mustache with her fingers. “If that leads to the outside, that’s where your bugs are coming from.”
“How the hell did this happen? This is a brand new apartment!” I growled. I dragged one of many of my unpacked heavy boxes of books over to the corner, and stood on top of it. The gap ran from the top of the corner to the bottom. It was barely visible at the bottom, near the floor, but was nearly an inch wide at the top.
“Gotta love Alabama building codes,” Marcia said. “Ew, don’t stick your fingers in there!”
“I think I see light coming from the other side. That sucks. It goes straight through the wall to outside. No wonder there’s bugs in here!”
I called Maintenance for the complex after Marcia left. Before I could get to sleep that night, I shoved some wadded-up paper towels into the gap.
When I got home from class the next day, there was a note from Maintenance on the door, saying they had fixed the defect and sorry for any inconvenience. I went inside to find the gap sealed up and painted over. I checked the rest of the apartment, and everything seemed fine. Even the flies were gone.
A few weeks later, Marcia and I were studying for an exam, and she looked over at the corner. “I thought you said they fixed that gap.” She was right. The gap was back, a small dark line zigzagging down the corner between the two walls. Marcia handed me her cellphone, which had a fancy light on it. I stood on the same box of unpacked books, and shined the light on the gap.
“Those lazy jerks from Maintenance didn’t fix anything,” I said. “They just squirted some caulk in here, smoothed it down, and painted over it.”
After the exam, I went back to my apartment to meet with Hector, the head of Maintenance for the complex. Hector was short, stocky, nut brown and had the largest teeth that I had ever seen. He seemed very concerned about the gap, and promised to fix it as fast as possible. He radioed another member of the Maintenance staff, and soon there were two other guys shoving my furniture around, walking in and out of the sliding glass door that led to the small back patio. I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. As I was eating, I heard several raised voices, arguing in Spanish.
I walked back to the living room. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
Hector turned away from his argument with the two other maintenance men, and smiled at me. “No ma’am. We’re just having a… technical discussion.” One of the men, looking unhappy, said something in Spanish.
“So there is a problem,” I said.
“The measurements… they don’t add up,” Hector said. He pulled out a tape measure, and walked to the corner. “On the outside, this is four feet, three inches, from the stud to the edge of the door.” He extended the tape, and ran it along the inside wall. “On the inside… it’s four feet, five inches.”
“Dos,” said one of the workmen, shaking his head.
“Two inches,” I said. “Two inches bigger on the inside than on the outside. Maybe the angles are off?”
“No ma’am. I’ve been checking with a plumb bob and a level,” Hector said, pointing at a pile of gear on a sawhorse table nearby, “and everything checks out. I even drilled two holes all the way through the wall and out the siding. One here by the door, and the other down at the end by the corner. It’s one and a quarter inches’ difference between those two holes, inside to outside. It’s the damndest thing.” Hector glanced up at me. “Pardon my language, miss. This thing, it worries me. I worry about some sort of foundation damage, or even a sinkhole, that might be causing the walls to lean, and that’s messing up my measurements.”
The complex management moved me to another apartment in a building on the opposite side of the neighborhood. It looked exactly the same as my old apartment, but the light was different, and it was closer to the football stadium, so game nights were pretty loud. As the nights got longer, classwork, exams and research papers loomed over me, and I buried myself in work, shunning my friends in favor of studying for exams and completing papers.
Just before Halloween, the college had a mid-semester break. Classes were dismissed on Thursday and Friday, giving us a four-day weekend. Of course, all my professors scheduled mid-term exams on the Monday and Tuesday before the break. When I stumbled out of the last exam, I was ready for some relaxation. Marcia picked me up at seven, and we went to the annual Halloween party at the Kappa Sigma frat house. The Kappa Sigs might be a bunch of nerds, but they have a certain affinity for alcohol.
Early the next morning, head still numb from Kappa Sigma booze, teeth chattering from the cold, I let myself into my apartment. I staggered to the bathroom, fumbled for the light, and scared myself silly when I saw my reflection in the mirror. My zombie makeup had not held up very well over the night. I washed my face, twice, brushed my teeth, peed, then went to my room and collapsed into bed.
When I woke, it was still dark. I felt the somehow familiar creak of the bed as someone sat on the side of the bed behind me. I felt the pull and tug of the covers as someone slid into bed, and heard the faint whisper of breathing beside me. I slowly opened my eyes, and looked to my right. In the bed next to me lay a large man, or maybe a woman, although he seemed male to me. His lank black hair lay tangled on the pillow next to mine, and his pallid skin almost seemed to glow in the dim light of my bedroom. His mouth was a horror of metal and leather, shuttered by a bit of some sort, bolted or fastened to the skin. His jaw fluttered and twitched, and I could hear the faint noise of his teeth as they ground against the bit. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, on some undefined point above us.
I tensed, heart racing, and began to sit up and away from him. His arm shot out across my chest, and held me down. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a few whimpers emerged. He snapped his head towards mine, and fixed me with his terrible eyes. They were quite clear, even in the darkness of my room, and I can see them still, pale yellow, circles moving within circles. He raised his other hand to his face, extended a finger, and said “Shh.” He turned his eyes back toward the ceiling. I quit fighting, and made no more sounds. We lay like that for hours, or decades, and I finally fell back asleep.
When I awoke, he was gone. I vividly remembered the experience, but I was skeptical enough to dismiss it as a particularly horrific episode of sleep paralysis, perhaps brought about by too many tequila shots. I laughed at myself for checking under the bed and in the closet, then opened the bedroom door.
There were flies everywhere.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of dead flies littered the apartment floor. A few live ones buzzed lazily around the hallway, but most were dead. My slippers crunched on insect bodies as I dazedly walked to the living room. My heart had already confirmed what I would see, before I saw it. There was a gap between two walls, in the corner of the living room. It was wider then, at maybe an inch and a half. I walked slowly towards it, disturbing a few living flies such that each of my steps was accompanied by a slight buzzing noise. When I reached the wall, I stopped. I stared at the gap. With a deep sense of dread, I saw my arm raise, and saw my hand put my fingers into the gap. Why did I do that? My fingers brushed the broken plaster at the edge, and I felt, more than heard, a deep, growling roar. The wall shuddered as if struck by a massive blow. I jerked my hand back, and ran out of my apartment.
Maintenance never found any flies. That was the line the apartment complex management gave me each of the six times I called. I demanded they send an exterminator, and they agreed to send someone to look at it. I called back to check, and they told me the head of Maintenance had investigated and found no insects in the unit. I asked to speak to Hector, but they said Hector was no longer employed with them.
I refused to go back to that apartment. I waited in Marcia’s car as she went in to retrieve some of my essentials — clothing, toiletry, homework.
“There’s no flies in there, honey,” Marcia said, with a concerned look on her face. “I saw two dead ones in the bathroom sink, but not bunches all over.” She looked at me. “I bet that new maintenance guy came in and cleaned it all up, cos he’s new and it made him look bad.”
When I called Uncle John, he promised he would fix everything. He called me back later in the day to say that the apartment complex management agreed to let me break my lease. He had found another apartment, in a tower a few blocks away, and I could move in immediately. Later I found that my uncle had made some fairly severe threats, such that the complex management admitted there was a small crack in the wall due to “settling”, but refused to acknowledge any major structural anomalies, and flatly denied any insect infestation of any sort.
Marcia and a few other friends of mine put my few belongings into the bed of a pickup truck and moved me into my new apartment. It was on the fourteenth floor of a building in Florence’s downtown, and turned out to be a three-bedroom corner apartment. I love it. The light is great, and it has a beautiful view.
But.
There are six cracks in the ceiling. Six.
There are two hairline cracks in the bedroom wall, one lateral, extending eight and three quarters inches from the window, and one vertical, extending twenty seven inches from the left-hand power outlet.
There are four small cracks in the long wall in the living room. 38 5/16. 42 1/2. 16 1/4. 33 9/16.
There is one long crack in the kitchen wall behind the refrigerator. 48 5/8.
There is a gap in the bathroom between the tub and the tiles. This is the one I am worried about. I didn’t measure it when I moved in because I have been very tired and have not slept very well. Which was stupid. I should have measured it. I know better. But the gap is very small. It is really too small to use U.S. customary measurements.
I may have to switch to metric.
Story Credits: Eric Dodd, http://unxmaal.com/?p=1887
