Good evening, it’s Spooky Boo Rhodes from the KSND radio waves in Sand Castle, California. Tonight I have for you two very weird and creepy stories from the creepypasta library about those photo booths you find at the mall. Sandcastle has an old photobooth stuck in the corner of its mall and all but the tourists tend to stay away from it for people have disappeared or seen faces in their photos that shouldn’t be there. As for the tourists? Who knows? Those who don’t disappear are too shocked to discuss their visit until much later.
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Now let’s begin…
The Arcade
by EmbraceTheDarkness
When I was in high school, my girlfriend and I would go to the mall a lot. It wasn’t something I enjoyed very much, but it made her happy, so I didn’t complain. Every time we went, she would make us get our pictures taken in those photo booth things. You know, the ones where you put in two quarters or whatever and get a strip of pictures taken and printed off? It was kind of a ritual. She kept the best one from each visit in her locker.
One time, we went and the booth was taped off. I guess someone thought it would be funny to use it to take pictures of his dick, and then leave the strip (covered in his semen, no less) in the booth. The parents of the little girl who went in next were not amused, and the mall was going to be taking it out. I think that’s an overreaction but expected nowadays.
Well, my girlfriend was pretty sad about not being able to get our pictures taken like usual, so we ended up just wandering aimlessly. She didn’t really want to leave, but she didn’t feel like shopping either. I bought us some ice cream, hoping it would cheer her up. but she still was pretty depressed.
Eventually, we ended up at the far end of the second floor. We almost never got over there, as there weren’t many stores either of us were interested in. but today we did. I noticed that there was an arcade there, and that got me thinking. They tend to have a photo booth in them. I didn’t want to say anything about that, to avoid getting my girlfriend’s hopes up, but I managed to convince her to go in.
It was noisy inside, but mostly just from the games. There were only a few other kids inside, and the owner sitting at a small desk watching some sports game on TV. We walked around the place, and didn’t see a booth. Saddened a bit, I suggested that we go, and she started to say that she agreed when her sentence drifted off. I looked where she was looking, and tucked back in a corner there was a machine that said “Instantly Developed Photos” peaking over one of the games. We nearly ran over to it, but were disheartened to find that it too was taped off.
My girlfriend was really sad now and suggested that we leave the mall now. I hated seeing her like this, and I thought to myself, “You know what? Almost no one is in here, and none of them are paying attention to us.” So I went over, plugged in the booth, and pulled the tape down. At first, she was shocked that I would do that, but then the joy at being able to carry on our tradition overtook her.
One thing that was incredibly obvious about this booth was that it was much older than the one that we usually went to. It was beaten up, didn’t have a touchscreen menu, and only cost ten cents a strip.
We decided to do a double strip since it would still be cheaper than one of our normal ones. We put in two dimes, and then it took our pictures. When the last one was done, we looked and saw that there wasn’t a slot for them to be printed on the inside. It was odd, but I guess back when this thing was made they didn’t think to have them print on the inside.
So we got out and looked at the sides of the booth, and found the pictures. There wasn’t much light inside the arcade, so my girlfriend picked them up and we were walking outside to see them better when we realized something. There was no sound anymore.
All the games were running, but it was like someone hit the mute button on all of them. It creeped my girlfriend out, and I’ll admit I was unnerved as well. So we walked towards the exit a little faster. But we couldn’t find it. Every corner we took just led us to another row of arcade games, with flashing lights and no sound. Now we were both panicking, but I managed to be rational enough to figure out that, if I climbed on top of one of the machines, I would be able to get a view of the room.
I went over to one and asked my girlfriend to give me a little support as I climbed it. I got on top and saw that somehow we had gone further into the arcade. The exit was on the other side. I told her, and she calmed down a bit. I was trying to get down from the game when I thought something brushed my hand. I screamed and fell.
My girlfriend tried to catch me, but I just knocked her into the machine and fell onto the floor. I wasn’t hurt badly, and I got up to tell her I was sorry. When I turned to look at her, I saw she was staring at the screen and shaking. I walked over beside her and saw that it no longer was showing the menu. No, flashing in old-fashioned arcade game letters, was the message “Player 2 has no more lives.”
I told her that I must have started a game when I climbed up, but she shook her head no and whispered “Look around.” Every game was flashing the same words. That really freaked us out, so we started running in the direction of the exit.
We went around turns and turns of games, and it seemed we had been running far too long to have covered less distance than is contained in a shop in a mall. But now we could see it. Seven rows of games ahead, rising above them all, was the exit sign. We stopped for a moment when we saw it, relieved and catching our breath. Then my girlfriend screamed.
She spun around to look behind her and screamed that something had just touched her hair. We looked around but saw nothing. No one was near us. But there was something worse than the presence of someone else. The screens now all showed the words “Player 1 has no more lives.”
That was it. We were sprinting faster than we ever had before, running towards the exit sign. We just had to get around three more rows and we would be out of the arcade. And then we saw something that brought us to a halt. There was someone standing at one of the games.
He was one of the kids we had seen earlier when we came in. I recognized the clothes, even though I hadn’t paid much attention to him before. He was just standing there, playing a game. After the shock of seeing someone else had passed, I thought I should call out to him.
“Hey, dude!”
My girlfriend grabbed my arm and shushed me.
“Don’t,” she whispered harshly in my ear.
“Why not, what’s the matter?”
“Something doesn’t feel right. Let’s just keep going, we’re almost out.”
So we walked past him, hugging the other side of the row of games. Something seemed wrong with him, in the glow of the lights. I stopped walking and just looked at him. My girlfriend begged me to keep going, but I had to figure out what was wrong. I took a few steps closer, and it hit me. His hands were on the controls, the game was playing, but he wasn’t moving at all.
I walked closer and closer, and all the while my girlfriend was crying and begging me to go back to her. I got to him, touched him on the shoulder, and shivered from how freezing cold he was. I asked if he was ok, and walked beside him to get a look at his face.
His throat was slit, and his skin was paper white.
I screamed so loud and so intensely that I hurt my voice. I turned back to my girlfriend and started to run to her when I saw someone holding a hand over her mouth and a knife to her throat. I couldn’t see the face, but the figure’s hands looked like a man’s.
I shouted at him, “let her go!” The response was a laugh, deep and gurgling. I tried to lunge at him, to get the knife away from her throat, but I wasn’t fast enough. He slit her open in one fluid motion. Blood sprayed out all over me, and I was frozen in shock.
He dropped her body and brought the knife to his face. It was still shrouded in darkness, but I saw a tongue come out, and lick the knife. That tongue… it wasn’t human. It looked more like a giraffe’s, long and thin. I was crying now, and couldn’t think. Then he pointed at me and said “you wait there. You next.” That voice, it was horrible. It was like two rough stones being dragged across each other. But what came next was worse. He bent down to my girlfriend’s body, and started sucking the fatal wound.
His mouth covered her entire neck, and it made a horrifying squelching sound as he sucked the blood from her. I couldn’t think, couldn’t react with anything but more tears and a sighing cry. And then the noises started to stop. He pulled back, and his mouth was extended like a trunk, and it began to pull back into his face. When it was back to normal, that tongue came out again and licked the traces of blood off his lips.
He pulled the knife out again and started advancing toward me. Part of me wanted to let him kill me. I didn’t want to live with these memories. But that part of my mind was overridden by a more primitive section. The adrenaline poured out into my body, and I ran. I didn’t even know what was happening anymore, I just ran.
Somehow I managed to make it to the exit. As I ran I saw the owner still sitting at his TV, now blank, and some still active part of my mind realized that his skin was far too pale and that there was a black line running along his neck. But I caught all of that in the few seconds before bursting out of the door and running into a woman outside of the arcade.
I frantically screamed, begging her to call the police, the paramedics, anyone. She screamed too, at first I thought because I seemed crazy. Then I realized that I had blood all over me. My girlfriend’s blood.
Eventually, security came and the woman told them I had come from inside the arcade. One of them stayed with me, and the other two went inside. They came back out and told the man with me to handcuff me while they contacted the police.
What they had found was my girlfriend’s body, throat slit, drained of blood. This was expected. I had seen her die. What I didn’t expect was that her’s was the only one. Nor did I expect it to be found in the photo booth. But the worst part, the piece of evidence that I can never comprehend, the reason that my mind was broken to the point I was considered incompetent for trial, was that two strips of pictures were found in the booth with her.
They showed me slitting her throat.
Now I spend my days out of my mind on medication in a psych ward. But sometimes, I trick them into thinking I took my medication so that I can think for a while. And I always think back to that day. And I have an idea about it. I think that, sometime, someone else will go into that arcade. They’ll find it empty except for the owner sitting there watching a sports game, a couple of kids playing games, and a beautiful girl sitting alone in a photo booth. And I wonder, will this person ever leave the arcade?
The Booth
by Mourneris
Everyone has heard about Miami, Florida; at some point, it was known as Vice City. Generally, throughout most of the year, it’s filled with the warm accompaniment of the sun and its subtle, tropical warmth.
Just like any other city though, its more suburban areas are flooded with several flavors of shopping malls with a different assortment of characteristics that appeal to teenagers and those post the age group alike.
This pleasant Sunday evening, a boy and a girl in their latter teens walked together through the coolly lit walkways of a shopping mall, a somewhat charming Jason and his beautiful girlfriend Kassy. They walked talking about this and that, holding hands and occasionally but with frequency exchanging loving kisses.
“Hey look, it’s a picture booth!” exclaimed Jason as he smiled at Kassy and proceeded, “we should take some pictures together. What do you think?” Kassy was not much a fan of silly things such as taking pictures in booths but that night the idea sounded perfectly appealing as it was something she and Jason had never done as a couple. She gave him a delightful nod and returned his warm smile with one of her own as they stepped into the booth and sat down.
The booth itself had absolutely no lettering on it and was painted a color resembling blood and the curtain had several stains on it if they could be called that. By all means, they did not pay much mind to it since it was a booth and it was in the middle of a mall where everyone always walked through and used its many utilities. After inserting a dollar into the booth, and discussing what poses they would take for the pictures, they pressed the start button together and smiled at the camera while their heads were leaned against each other. The second picture was of them smiling with that youthful passion, which was in turn followed by a picture of them kissing. The second to last was of him kissing her cheek and she ended the strip with one of herself kissing his neck. They confirmed their purchase the booth printed two copies of the same pictures in the typical strip format; each about a square inch.
Upon arriving at his house and greeting his parents, Jason headed to his room and taped the strip to the right side of his computer monitor, and looked it over one last time before heading off to bed. As he awoke the next morning, he yawned and stretched quickly before slapping over at his iPhone to shut off the alarm before getting up and walking over to his computer, sitting down in his boxers as he cracked his fingers and turned on the monitor to check his e-mails before heading off to get ready for college.
Out of the corner of his eye however, with quite a level of confusion, he noticed something which made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end while a chill ran down his spine, goose-bumps reigning over his skin all over his body. The smile on Kassy’s face had changed, but not just in a simple manner, it had taken on slightly malignant and sadistic features while his own smile had straightened out and became what seemed distressed. All the while he did not dare look directly at it; his eyes were glued in place as if his body refused to even inspect this peculiar occurrence.
After several minutes of staring at his desktop, Jason stood and placed his hands on his desk, leaning forward as he now stared closely at the strip; his confusion and awe had become more of a curious emotion. His finger glided along the strip as he closely watched each picture. The same malignant and sadistic features took refuge upon his girlfriend’s face throughout all the pictures as well as his own face and its distressed look. It was somewhat fascinating to him how a picture could just change like that, though he also knew that pictures could be manipulated in Photoshop.
The thing was though, to him, the strip was the same exact strip that he had received from the booth, he just knew it. His parents surely did not have enough experience with computers to manipulate this set of images and then replace them on his monitor, this is what turned his fascination into more of an ominous sense of foreboding. Jason took a look at the clock on his taskbar and realized that he had to get moving, so he decided to grab the strip, slip it in his wallet, and then go to his girlfriend’s to show her what had happened to the strip.
That evening, he walked into Kassy’s house, greeted her parents, and then headed over to her room. As he passed the bathroom, he noticed the light was on and that the shower was also on. “Hey, I am here, I’m going to be waiting in your room, alright?” He had knocked on the door and then said this, to which she responded with a loud yes so it could be heard over the roaring of the water.
He stepped into her room and walked over to her bed, taking a seat as he noticed that her strip was on the wall, but more importantly it was perfectly normal. Shocking to him this was, very much indeed as with great hurry he took out his wallet and removed the strip which he put side to side with Kassy’s. He could feel the blood sink to his feet; her eyes had become black and the malignant and sinister smile spread from ear to ear, revealing razor-sharp teeth that were stained with blood.
More horrifically, however, was the look of pain and anguish upon his own face and the fact this his eyes were shut in all the pictures. His eyes scanned down and when they fell upon the last picture, his heart stopped. His girlfriend was eating away his neck and he could see the tendons and arteries as she took a chunk from it with great pleasure and a wide grin.
Jason dropped the strip and stood, stepping away from the wall with stumbling steps when he heard the door open slowly. He felt a sense of relief as he knew Kassy would walk in and comfort him, but when he began to turn around, he noticed red… blood. The muscles of his neck seemed to strain as to prevent him from finishing the rotation, but he saw more and more… teeth, black eyes, blood, claws. No.
Next thing he knew, she was on him and her claws quickly found his mouth, shutting it as those sharp teeth tore with ease through his neck and took a nice chunk out of it while her empty claw dug deep into his gut, ripping open his torso and pulling out his intestines. She had killed him quite quickly with that one bite and the ripping open of his stomach, but she was busy eating his innards with great delight as she gave a grim chuckle.
Shattering glass was heard then; Kassy’s parents were quick to be there in her room only to find the mangled and disemboweled body of Jason, and a hole in her window. Her mother vomited on the floor immediately and her father nearly fainted, they knew nothing of what had happened or where their daughter was, and neither would they ever know either, for the strip that had belonged to Jason had returned to normal.
***
Thank you for listening. If you enjoy these stories, please head on over to my website at www.scarystorytime.com and make a comment. You can also follow me on youtube and social media pretty much anywhere at spookyboorhodes. I’d like to thank the listeners and the Patreon members including madjoe, Bobbi Elliott, DrJoeBlob, PA Nightmares, Ivy Iverson, John Newby, and Lana. Get your podcast commercial free by joining the Patreon page at www.spookyboo.club.
That’s all for tonight. I’ll see you in your nightmares.
